Once the children are in bed, have a cheeky round of Fibber.
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But he's not an all-out fibber when it comes to his ups and downs.
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We are likely to see the same unvarnished, unapologetic fibber on stage at Hofstra tonight.
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One was a thoughtful-sounding charismatic force and a talented fibber, a virtuoso at erecting strawmen and offering false choices.
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The other is a clumsy and transparent fibber, an incompetent novice pushing his party into whatever ideologically untethered position is catching his fancy at the moment.
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That the White House communications director should have to lie on behalf of her boss, who is a serial boaster, stretcher of the truth and documented outright fibber, should not be surprising.
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To maintain accuracy in her records, she grilled mountaineers before and after summit attempts, traveling to their hotels in her powder-blue Volkswagen Beetle to ask what they had seen at the top and to catch the occasional fibber.
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Michael Ford is firing back at his ex-wife, calling her a fibber for telling the world he walked out on their marriage while she was 8 months pregnant and their other child was fighting cancer ... and he thinks her story is so outrageous, it's actually funny.
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The television version of Fibber McGee and Molly, with Bob Sweeney as Fibber, was a critical and commercial failure.
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Fibber McGee and Molly with Ted Weems and his Orchestra broadcasting from Chicago in 1937. If Smackout proved the Jordan-Quinn union's viability, their next creation proved their most enduring. Amplifying Luke Grey's tall talesmanship to Midwestern braggadocio, Quinn developed Fibber McGee and Molly with Jim as the foible-prone Fibber and Marian playing his patient, common sense, honey-natured wife. In its earliest incarnation, Fibber McGee and Molly put focus on Fibber's tall tales and extended monologues.
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James Edward Jordan (November 16, 1896 – April 1, 1988) was the American actor who played Fibber McGee in Fibber McGee and Molly and voiced the albatross Orville in Disney's The Rescuers (1977).
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Quinn also created the popular Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve character on Fibber McGee and Molly.
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The nickname "Fibber" came from his father's attempts to say "February", the month of his birth.
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The whole world can call me a fibber or a gombeen man, because I won't be suing.
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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.). Comedian ZaSu Pitts appeared on the Fibber McGee and Company show, as did singer Donald Novis. While his wife was ill, Jim Jordan had been closing his radio shows by saying "Goodnight, Molly." In early 1938, the Federal Communications Commission ordered him to stop, claiming it violated a rule about using public airwaves for personal communications.
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Fibber has a long-standing grudge against Otis, making him out to seem like a self-centered, overblown hack, even though seemingly everyone else sees Cadwallader as a lovely, dashing man. Otis's feelings toward Fibber are never mentioned, giving the impression that Fibber's grudge is one-sided. As revealed late in 1942, Fibber's anger is actually a front to keep Cadwallader away, as Fibber once borrowed money from Otis and never paid it back. Cadawallader visits the McGees in one episode.
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Each episode also featured an appearance by announcer Harlow Wilcox, whose job it was to weave the second ad for the sponsor into the plot without having to break the show for a real commercial. Wilcox's introductory pitch lines were usually met with groans or humorously sarcastic lines by Fibber. During the many years that the show was sponsored by Johnson Wax, Fibber nicknamed Wilcox "Waxy", due to Wilcox's constant praises of their various products, and during the years the show was sponsored by Pet Milk, Fibber changed the nickname to "Milky". In a style not unusual for the classic radio years, the show was typically introduced as, "The Johnson Wax Program, with Fibber McGee and Molly".
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Isabel Randolph gained nationwide popularity on the radio show Fibber McGee and Molly (on the air 1935-1959), where she began in various "snooty" roles January 13, 1936,Dunning, John (1998) "On the Air: the Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio" Oxford University Press US; , page 245 eventually becoming a long-running series character, the pompous Mrs. Abigail Uppington, a snooty society matron whom Fibber addressed as "Uppy," and whose pretensions Fibber delighted in deflating. She stayed with the comedy series for seven years until the show began its eighth season in the fall of 1943."Radio: Fibber McGee and Molly" (review), Billboard, October 16, 1943, page 12 (also available at the Google Books online archive; accessed January 1, 2017.
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The Jordans and Don Quinn collaborated on the creation of a new show for Johnson Wax, Fibber McGee and Molly.
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NBC approached Jay Ward, producer of the Rocky and Bullwinkle TV cartoons, to film a series of half-hour Fibber McGee and Molly cartoons. This was probably an attempt by NBC to compete with ABC's then-new cartoon sitcom The Flintstones. Ward declined, and the Fibber McGee and Molly franchise finally came to an end.
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When someone told a man named Addison that McGee was a glib talker, McGee became known as "Ad Glib McGee". Or, when Fibber made expressions with his eyes, he was nicknamed "Eyes-a-muggin' McGee" (a play on the popular Stuff Smith swing tune "I'se A-muggin'"). From there Fibber jumps headfirst into a long, breathless and boastful description of his nickname, using an admirable amount of alliteration. Mentioned for a time on the program was Otis Cadwallader, who was a schoolmate of Fibber and Molly in Peoria and Molly's boyfriend before McGee.
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Fibber, not admitting he is broke, rents the bridal suite and chooses to have their once cancelled anniversary party held at the lodge. Still in the lobby, Cadwalader asks Fibber and offers to pay him if he can convince Bergen to invest in a synthetic gasoline formula developed by inventor Wallace Wimple (Bill Thompson). Fibber is able to visit Wimple and see his formula in action; he agrees to partner with Cadwalader. Meanwhile, Bergen and Charlie have been asked by an institute to find a rare silk- spinning moth.
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Bergen's almost crash landing interrupts a meeting with Wistful Vista's Chamber of Commerce. Fibber, president, has just proposed the selling of the town's airstrip to Hilary Horton, owner of the Horton Aircraft Factory. The Commerce and townspeople thought Bergen's aircraft was carrying Horton. Bergen and Charlie are welcomed with Fibber and Molly inviting them to stay at their home.
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This was the beginning of the end both for the show and for Jordan. The program officially ended in 1956 but the Jordans continued their roles as Fibber McGee and Molly in short skits on the NBC radio program Monitor until October 2, 1959, when her poor health made her unable to continue. By the time Fibber McGee and Molly was adapted for television, Marian was too ill to reprise her role, and Cathy Lewis took her place, opposite Bob Sweeney as Fibber. Lewis's darker take on the character was a factor in the television series' cancellation after only a half-season.
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The next morning, the McGees leave Ramble Inn and Fibber insists, despite their finances, that they head to Lake Arcadia and spend at least one night at the Silver Tip Lodge. As Fibber checks into the lodge Molly bumps into her old beau, Otis Cadwalader (Gale Gordon). When Fibber, naturally jealous, has to be cordial to Cadwalader, he replies, "I've got bad news for you...I'm fine!" Also at the lodge, the McGees meet up with some old acquaintances: ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, his puppet, Charlie McCarthy, Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve (Harold Peary) and Abigail Uppington (Isabel Randolph).
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Marian Irene Driscoll Jordan (April 15, 1898 – April 7, 1961) was an American actress and radio personality. She was most remembered for portraying the role of Molly McGee, the patient, common sense, honey-natured wife of Fibber McGee on the NBC radio series Fibber McGee and Molly from 1935–1959. She starred on this series opposite her real-life husband Jim Jordan.
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Back at the McGees', Molly discovers that Julie is in love with Bergen and advises her to "sabotage" him into marriage. Everyone drives to the airstrip to meet Horton. As Fibber and Molly wait in Bergen's aircraft, he and Julie greet Jerry and Marge, who have just driven into town. When Fibber accidentally takes off, Julie and Bergen follow in another aircraft.
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Horton's aircraft is also coming and Fibber nearly crashes into him. Bergen climbs aboard the aircraft, and safely lands Fibber and Molly. After returning to the McGee house, Jerry and Marge announce their marriage. At that moment, Horton arrives and informs Bergen that he owns a controlling interest in the Horton company and can build a factory wherever he desires.
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She became exhausted and easily fatigued. A doctor suggested she take a long rest, but she refused, deciding instead to continue performing. The Fibber McGee and Molly program was then recorded from the Jordans' home in Encino. The music was pre-recorded, and the commercials were no longer part of the show, but her failing health soon ended the Fibber McGee and Molly show.
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On April 16, 1935, Marian Jordan, her husband Jim, and writer Don Quinn, began broadcasting Fibber McGee and Molly, on the NBC Blue Network Chicago radio affiliate WMAQ. The series was a big hit. Marian played the role of Molly McGee, the patient and intelligent wife who supports husband Fibber McGee through various get rich quick schemes and misadventures. In 1938, the show and Jordan would both suffer major changes.
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As Fibber McGee and Molly celebrate their 20th anniversary, they throw a large shindig, but everyone declines their invitation to the Silver Tip Lodge at Lake Arcadia. Discouraged, the McGees decide to have their own celebration—to relive their first honeymoon night at the Ramble Inn. Fibber and Molly are again discouraged upon finding that the inn has gone to ruin. Still, they decide to stay the night.
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During a search, they are met by Gildersleeve's sister, Jean (Ginny Simms), and her troop of girl guides. Bergen successfully finds a specimen and rushes back to the lodge to phone the institute, leaving Charlie to flirt with the girls. At the McGee's party that night, Fibber arranged for bandleader Ray Noble to provide the musical accompaniment. Charlie continues romancing the girl guides and Fibber talks to Bergen about Cadwalader's scheme.
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Actor Harold Peary had played a similarly named character, Dr. Gildersleeve, on earlier episodes. The Great Gildersleeve enjoyed its greatest popularity in the 1940s. Peary played the character during its transition from the parent show into the spin-off and later in four feature films released at the height of the show's popularity. In Fibber McGee and Molly, Peary's Gildersleeve had been a pompous windbag and antagonist of Fibber McGee.
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She played Hazel Norris on the television version of Fibber McGee and Molly,Terrace, Vincent (2011). Encyclopedia of Television Shows, 1925 through 2010. McFarland & Company, Inc. . P. 340.
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For instance, a job "looking in on the higher-ups at City Hall" turns out to be a window-cleaning job. Another interesting assignment was for Fibber to work in disguise for days at a time as the Wistful Vista Santa Claus. McGee is very proud of past deeds, sometimes recalling an interesting nickname he picked up over the years. Each one of these nicknames is, as usual with Fibber, a bad pun.
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To their delight, Jean and Bergen discover that the formula releases the silk threads. Returning to the lodge, Bergen, Jean, Charlie, and Fibber learn that Molly has driven off in a carriage with Cadwalader. Bergen and Fibber pursue the carriage on a wagon loaded with dynamite while Jean and Charlie follow by car. The chase ends when Molly pulls the carriage off the road, and the wagon is caught on a cliff.
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From 1956 to 1957, Sweeney starred with Gordon in the TV sitcom The Brothers. In 1959, he landed the lead role on the short-lived NBC television series Fibber McGee and Molly opposite Cathy Lewis. Unlike its radio counterpart, Fibber McGee failed on television and was cancelled after less than one season. During that same season, Sweeney directed the 18-week NBC sitcom Love and Marriage set in Tin Pan Alley of New York City.
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"You're a haa-aa-aa-aard man, McGee!" became a Gildersleeve catchphrase. The character went by several aliases on Fibber McGee and Molly; his middle name was revealed to be "Philharmonic" on October 22, 1940, in episode #258, "Fibber Discovers Gildersleeve's Locked Diary". "Gildy" grew so popular that Kraft Foods—promoting its Parkay margarine—sponsored a new series featuring Peary's somewhat mellowed and always befuddled Gildersleeve as the head of his own family.
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William Mac McGhee (September 5, 1905 – March 10, 1984) nicknamed "Fibber", was an American Major League Baseball first baseman and outfielder who played for the Philadelphia Athletics during the and seasons.
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Fibber McGee and Molly, which followed up the Jordans' previous radio sitcom Smackout, followed the adventures of a working-class couple, the habitual storyteller Fibber McGee and his sometimes terse but always loving wife Molly, living among their numerous neighbors and acquaintances in the community of Wistful Vista. As with most radio comedies of the era, Fibber McGee and Molly featured an announcer, house band and vocal quartet for interludes. At the peak of the show's success in the 1940s, it was adapted into a string of feature films. A 1959 attempt to adapt the series to television with a different cast and new writers was both a critical and commercial failure, which, coupled with Marian Jordan's death shortly thereafter, brought the series to a finish.
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In the 1970s, Jim Jordan briefly returned to acting. An episode of NBC's Chico and the Man featured a surprise appearance by Jordan as a friendly neighborhood mechanic. Jordan also lent his voice to Disney's animated film, The Rescuers (1977) and reprised his role as Fibber McGee (complete with the closet gag) in an advertisement for AARP. He died in 1988—a year before Fibber McGee and Molly was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.
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Learning of Fibber's plans, Bergen offers to convince Hilary, his friend, to build his factory at Wistful Vista. Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve (Harold Peary), secretly working for Ironton Realty, a rival company wanting to purchase Horton's factory, gets a scoop of Fibber and Bergen's plans. He goes to Sam Cudahy (Charles Halton), owner of Ironton Realty, planning to back out of Cudahy's schemes. Threatened by blackmail, Gildersleeve tricks Fibber into paying for an elaborate luncheon to honor their guest.
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Look Who's Laughing (aka Look Who's Talking) is a 1941 film from RKO Radio Pictures. The film is built around a number of radio stars from the Golden Age of Radio and centers around radio personality Jim Jordan as Fibber McGee from the comic duo, Fibber McGee and Molly, who plans to build an aircraft factory in a small town. Look Who's Laughing was followed by Here We Go Again (1942), with many of the radio stars reprising their performances.
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The series had solid comedy situations, and might have succeeded as a typical domestic comedy if the characters had been named anything but Fibber and Molly, but it couldn't replicate the flavor and humor of the original Fibber McGee and Molly. The TV series did not survive its first season, ending its run in January 1960. A pilot episode and at least three episodes of the television series have lapsed into the public domain. The second TV venture only got as far as the planning stages.
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Lewis was the daughter of an executive at the Johnson Wax Company and saw potential in the power trio. At that same time, Johnson Wax was looking for a new program to sponsor. Lewis saw potential in the Jordans and decided to give them a show of their own entitled Fibber McGee and Molly with Quinn serving as head writer. The character of Luke Gray was the basis of the Fibber McGee character and the character of Teeny was brought on to the series virtually unchanged.
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Molly's Uncle Dennis is one of the more common rarely heard regulars. He lives with the McGees and is apparently a dedicated alcoholic, becoming a punch line for many Fibber jokes and even the main subject of some shows in which he "disappeared". There are numerous references and jokes about the fact that Fibber doesn't have a regular job. Mayor La Trivia often offers McGee jobs at City Hall, and the jobs usually sound exciting when the duties are vaguely described; but they sometimes end up being very mundane.
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Yakky Doodle (voiced by Jimmy Weldon using the same buccal speech technique used for the voice of Donald Duck) is an anthropomorphic yellow duckling with green wings who lives with his best friend Chopper the bulldog. Yakky is always one to run into danger when it is most expected. This usually comes in the form of the show's main antagonist Fibber Fox or secondary villain Alfy Gator. Chopper defends his "Little Buddy" fiercely, and is always ready to pound Fibber or any other enemy into oblivion if necessary.
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The deterioration of Marian's health began in 1938 during the run of Fibber McGee and Molly. She battled alcoholism, and entered a rehabilitation center. She returned to radio in April, 1939. In 1953, Jordan's health became progressively worse.
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Peary returned the favor in a memorable 1944 Fibber McGee & Molly episode in which neither of the title characters appeared: Jim Jordan was recovering from a bout of pneumonia (this would be written into the show the following week, when the Jordans returned), and the story line involved Gildersleeve and nephew Leroy hoping to visit the McGees at home during a train layover in Wistful Vista, but finding Fibber and Molly not at home. At the end of the episode, Gildersleeve discovers the couple had left in a hurry that morning when they received Gildy's letter saying he would be stopping over in Wistful Vista. Marlin Hurt's Beulah was also spun off, leading to both a radio and television show that would eventually star Hattie McDaniel and Ethel Waters. Jim and Marian Jordan themselves occasionally appeared on other programs, away from their Fibber and Molly characters.
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P. 9. It was heard at 10 p.m. on Sunday during 1947, and in 1948 it aired on Tuesday at 9:30 p.m. The shift to Tuesday was fatal, as it placed the drama opposite Fibber McGee and Molly on NBC.
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Robert Allen Ogle (May 28, 1926 – February 25, 1984), known as Bob Ogle, was an American voice actor, animator and writer. Most characters he voiced are performed in the style of Bill Thompson's character Wallace Wimple from Fibber McGee and Molly.
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WMAQ carried original local and network programming. Marian and Jim Jordan started at WLS in 1927 with The Smith Family. They came to WMAQ, doing a local show called Smackout and later would move on to form Fibber McGee and Molly.
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In 1941, Tilton sang on Fibber McGee and Molly and starred on Campana Serenade, a program of popular music on first NBC and then CBS in 1942-1944. (Tilton sang on the later CBS version, with the Lud Gluskin Orchestra.) A contemporary newspaper article called Tilton's role on Fibber McGee and Molly "a milestone in her personal history ... Martha's biggest transcontinental [broadcast] since her days as soloist with Benny Goodman." In the early 1940s, she also sang on Ransom Sherman's program on CBS. Massey and Tilton starred in Alka-Seltzer Time, a 15-minute radio series broadcast weekdays on both CBS and Mutual.
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The front entrance of the NBC Tower at 454 N. Columbus Drive in Chicago. NBC became home to many of the most popular performers and programs on the air. Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Bob Hope, Fred Allen, and Burns and Allen called NBC home, as did Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra, which the network helped him create. Other programs featured on the network included Vic and Sade, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve (arguably broadcasting's first spin- off program, from Fibber McGee), One Man's Family, Ma Perkins and Death Valley Days.
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Fibber McGee and Molly was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1989. Marian and Jim Jordan were inducted the same year. Jordan also has a star for her contributions to radio on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1500 Vine Street.
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Heavenly Days is a 1944 film starring Fibber McGee and Molly. It was the third and final feature film to feature the popular radio characters; unlike the two previous entries, none of the radio show's supporting cast members appeared in this film.
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Smith was also in 24 television episodes encompassing eighteen series, from 1955's The Halls of Ivy, Navy Log and The 20th Century Fox Hour to 1959's Dinah Shore Show, in addition to a regular role on the 1959 sitcom Fibber McGee and Molly.
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In 1943, Phil Leslie became Quinn's writing assistant on the show. Quinn left at the end of the 1949-50 radio season to pursue other projects. In 1945, Quinn created The Beulah Show for CBS Radio. The program spun off Fibber McGee character Beulah Brown.
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During this time, Marian was drinking excessively. She entered a rehabilitation center in suburban Chicago and tried to get sober. The Jordan children were in high school and college. "Molly" was written out of the radio show, and the program was renamed Fibber McGee and Company.
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He played a shy man always trying to get advice on women. His character was ditzy as well, basically a male version of Gracie Allen's character. In 1942, Willson had his own program on NBC. Meredith Willson's Music was a summer replacement for Fibber McGee and Molly.
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According to GhanaWeb, Danson was to be sentenced for fraud on 23 March 2003, "for up to 16 months in prison, after which she will be deported to Ghana"."Mutilation fibber freed", nypost.com, 13 August 2003. However, she was sentenced to time served by federal Judge Charles Sifton.
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WFEL plays a wide variety of Old-time radio programs each evening such as Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, Casey, Crime Photographer, and The Whistler. WFEL also broadcasts services, sermons and devotions of Faith Evangelical Lutheran Church live to the Antioch area.
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Weems also co-wrote several popular songs: "The Martins and the McCoys", "Jig Time", "The One-Man Band", "Three Shif'less Skonks", and "Oh, Monah!", which he co-wrote with band member "Country" Washburn. Ted Weems and his Orchestra on the Fibber McGee and Molly NBC Radio show, 1937.
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Cecil B. DeMille, host of Lux Radio Theatre (1936–1945) Though the show focused on film and its performers, several classic radio regulars appeared in Lux Radio Theatre productions. Jim and Marian Jordan, better known as Fibber McGee and Molly, appeared on the show twice and also built an episode of their own radio comedy series around one of those appearances. Their longtime costar, Arthur Q. Bryan (wisecracking Doc Gamble on Fibber McGee and Molly), made a few Lux appearances, as well. Bandleader Phil Harris, a longtime regular on Jack Benny's radio program and his wife Alice Faye, who became radio stars with their own comedy show in 1948, appeared in a Lux presentation.
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The final act would then begin, with the last line usually being the lesson learned that day. A final commercial, then Billy Mills' theme song to fade. Later, Harlow would meet up and visit with the McGees, and work in a Johnson Wax commercial, sometimes assisted by Fibber and Molly.
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Returning quickly to Wistful Vista with a protesting Julie in tow. Bergen's business partner, Jerry (Lee Bonnell), with his former fiancée and Julie's replacement, Marge (Dorothy Lovett), search for Julie. Meanwhile, Fibber, humiliated, resigned from the Chamber of Commerce. His house is also in foreclosure and Cudahy purchased the airstrip.
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He worked as an assistant director on the Mack Sennett comedy The Lion and the House (1932), then the short feature Hypnotized (1932). He worked on the shorts A Wrestler's Bride (1933), The Plumber and the Lady (1933), Uncle Jake (1933), See You Tonight (1933), Husbands' Reunion (1933), and The Big Fibber (1933).
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It also gave birth to a spin-off. In 1941, a recurring character, Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, (played by Harold Peary), began a new show called The Great Gildersleeve. The radio and television series Beulah was also a spin-off of Fibber McGee and Molly. Marian Jordan's health began to deteriorate in the 1950s.
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Other film roles for the team include Look Who's Laughing (1941) and Here We Go Again (1942), both with Fibber McGee and Molly. Charlie McCarthy wore a US Army uniform in Stage Door Canteen (1943) with Mortimer Snerd. Bergen, McCarthy and Snerd were also featured in Walt Disney's Fun and Fancy Free (1947).
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The Red Jacket Jamboree is an old-time radio variety show which is reminiscent of A Prairie Home Companion and old-time shows such as Fibber McGee and Molly. The show, which is composed of approximately 16 segments, shares history and culture from Michigan's Upper Peninsula and that of the Keweenaw Peninsula.
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Don Quinn (November 18, 1900 – December 30, 1967) was an American comedy writer who started out as a cartoonist based in Chicago. According to sources, Quinn's career as a cartoonist was short-lived but his career as a writer began after he realized that the magazines and newspapers threw away his drawings he sent in but kept his captions. Quinn was best known as the sole writer (later head writer to Phil Leslie) of the popular old-time radio show Fibber McGee and Molly for 15 years and as the writer for the program's stars Jim and Marian Jordan for 20 years. Quinn was also the creator/head writer of radio's The Beulah Show, (a Fibber McGee spinoff), and television's The Halls of Ivy.
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Johnson's Wax, which sponsored Fibber McGee & Molly, sponsored an audition recording for The Great Gildersleeve, and the Kraft Cheese Company signed on as the show's regular sponsor. Gildersleeve was transplanted from Wistful Vista to Summerfield with more than just a locale change—now a bachelor (his character had a never-heard wife on Fibber McGee & Molly), and now the water commissioner instead of the owner of the Gildersleeve's Girlish Girdles company. With much of his pomposity and cantankerousness toned down, he was also newly domesticated and appointed guardian of his orphan niece Marjorie and nephew Leroy. Implicitly well-off though by no means wealthy, Gildersleeve was depicted winding up his lingerie-making company and taking up a new life as Summerfield's water commissioner.
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The band embarked on a tour to celebrate the albums 10-year anniversary, kicking off the European leg in Fibber Magees, Dublin, Ireland. On June 18, it was announced that Eron Bucciarelli had parted ways from the band shortly after its release. On January 20, 2015, it was announced Micah Carli had also departed.
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The other cast members circa 1939. Fibber McGee and Molly was one of the earliest radio comedies to use an ensemble cast of regular characters played by actors other than the leads, nearly all of whom had recurring phrases and running gags, in addition to numerous other peripheral characters unheard from over the course of the series.
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The chief of the tribe is fearfully impressed at the speaking totem. As Bergen searches for the cocoons, Charlie makes advances to the other Indian squaws, angering the Indians. Fleeing from the reservation, Bergen and Charlie return to their laboratory with the cocoons. Back at the Silver Tip Lodge, Fibber tells Molly about his business deal with Cadwalader.
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Yakky Doodle (voiced by Jimmy Weldon in the style of Donald Duck) is a duck who lives with his best friend Chopper the Bulldog (voiced by Vance Colvig impersonating Wallace Beery). Chopper would usually protect Yakky from being eaten by Fibber Fox (voiced by Daws Butler impersonating Shelley Berman) or Alfy Gator (voiced by Daws Butler impersonating Alfred Hitchcock).
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Bozulich is making her 4th album for her group, Evangelista on Constellation Records. The members of the previous 3 Evangelista albums have featured Montreal artists from Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion (feat. Jessica Moss of The Geraldine Fibbers), Shahzad Ismaily, Ches Smith, Lisa Gamble and ex-Fibber, Nels Cline, among many more.
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WMAQ's new daytime signal provided secondary coverage to most of Illinois, including Peoria and Springfield. It also provided a strong signal to much of southern Wisconsin (with Milwaukee getting a city-grade signal) and almost half of Indiana. At night, it reached most of the eastern three-fourths of North America. Fibber McGee and Molly from Chicago, 1937.
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In 1931, Max's son, Max Samuel (M.S.), joined the company. When Max the elder died in 1933, his widow, Daisy, and their two sons, M.S. and Richard, continued the business, forming a partnership in 1936. The Bon-Ton was a popular store destination on the classic radio show Fibber McGee and Molly, which aired from 1935 to 1959.
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In 1976, he appeared in a television special, The Good Old Days of Radio, in which he and several vintage radio stars---including Art Linkletter, Eddie Anderson (Rochester on The Jack Benny Program), Jim Jordan (Fibber McGee & Molly), Dennis Day, George Fenneman (Groucho Marx's sidekick for You Bet Your Life), and Edgar Bergen--- discussed highlights of their radio careers.
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He became Dinah Shore's arranger/conductor and worked freelance for the Bob Crosby Orchestra. Weston also worked with Fibber McGee and Molly and Paul Whiteman. When Bob Crosby's band was hired for his brother Bing's film, Holiday Inn, this took him to Hollywood and into film work. He changed his name from Wetstein to Weston after his arrival in California.
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In the 1920s, Jordan did a radio show in Chicago entitled Luke and Mirandy. She played the role of Mirandy with her husband Jim as Luke. It was a farm-report program in which Luke told tall tales and face-saving lies for comedic effect. Marian Jordan also appeared as Molly in six movies based on Fibber McGee and Molly.
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Jordan was the son of Jim and Marian Jordan, better known as Fibber McGee and Molly. On February 12, 1962, Knudsen married Francis S. Kellstrom, an electrical contractor. They separated that July and were divorced October 22, 1962. She suffered from crippling arthritis for most of her later years and was cared for by her close friend, actress Jennifer Jones.
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Their presence continued a Monitor tradition of offering new material from classic radio favorites (including James and Marian Jordan of Fibber McGee and Molly fame, until Marian Jordan's death). Lynch returned again in the 1970s. In 1973, she revived Ethel and Albert on National Public Radio's Earplay with a 16-episode run. Karl Schmidt, the creator of Earplay, played Albert in this incarnation.
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Audrey Call (1905-2001) was an American violinist and composer, writing for and soloing with studio orchestras for NBC and CBS in New York, Chicago, and Hollywood. One of very few women composers writing in a jazz style for the violin, she performed on the "Fibber McGee and Molly", "Dennis Day", "Imogene Coca", and Ronald Colman's Halls of Ivy radio shows.
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Concerto for Constantine played throughout Ireland, during November 2007, on the 11 date 2fm 2moro 2our. The band supported The Smashing Pumpkins in Dublin and in Belfast on February 9-10. They played their very first headlining show in Fibber Magees on February 22, 2008. The band were due to play two dates in London at the end of March.
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The Kings Men performed the song on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio program on January 10, 1950. Bing Crosby recorded the song with Vic Schoen and His Orchestra on January 3, 1950. Dinah Shore also recorded the song on September 9, 1949. It is currently in the compilation of 1992 Sony Music (Legacy label) album "Zip A Dee Doo Dah".
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A reviewer in Variety called Templeton "that perennial summer replacement favorite." His radio program, Alec Templeton Time, sponsored by Alka-Seltzer, was first broadcast from 1939 to 1941 (initially as a summer replacement for Fibber McGee and Molly), returning in 1943 and 1946–47. It was sometimes known as The Alec Templeton Show. Guests included Kay Lorene and Pearl Bailey.
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William H. Thompson (July 8, 1913 – July 15, 1971) was an American voice actor, radio comedian and actor, whose career stretched from the 1930s until his death. He was a featured comedian playing multiple roles on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio series, and was the voice of Droopy in most of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer theatrical cartoons from 1943 to 1958.
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An hour of Old Time Radio shows from the 1930s through 1950s air every night at midnight and from 1 to 4p Sundays. These include "Gunsmoke", "My Favorite Husband", "Dragnet", "Fibber McGee and Molly", "The Great Gildersleeve", "Suspense", "The Life of Riley" and others. Rez Radio also live streams 24/7 on iHeartRadio TuneIn.com, Radio Garden, and from its own website.
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Hurt's inspiration for the Beulah voice was an African-American woman named Mary who cooked for his family. While he was using this characterization on The Fred Brady Show, the summer 1943 replacement for The Bob Burns Show on NBC, Fibber McGee writer Don Quinn "discovered" Hurt for a widespread audience, and cast Hurt/Beulah as the McGees' maid on what was one of the highest rated radio programs. The widespread popularity of the Fibber McGee and Molly version of Hurt's character, based as much on the novelty of a white man portraying a black woman as the humor written for the character, soon warranted a spin-off series. In 1945, Beulah was spun off into her own radio show, The Marlin Hurt and Beulah Show; Hurt also played Beulah's boyfriend, Bill Jackson, in addition to his title roles.
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This Way Please is a 1937 American musical comedy directed by Robert Florey and featuring Charles Rogers, a popular singer from the days of vaudeville entertainment. According to historian Martin Grams, the film was the introduction of Mary Livingstone (Mrs. Jack Benny) and Jim and Marian Jordan (radio's Fibber McGee and Molly). It was also Betty Grable's first motion picture under contract with Paramount Studios.
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Smackout was picked up by NBC in April 1933 and broadcast nationally until August 1935. One of the S. C. Johnson company's owners, Henrietta Johnson Lewis, recommended that her husband, John, Johnson Wax's advertising manager, try the show out on a national network. The terms of the agreement between S. C. Johnson and the Jordans awarded the company ownership of the names "Fibber McGee" and "Molly".
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Charlie confesses to Julie that Gildersleeve suggested sending the fake telegram. Julie then devises a scheme to foil Cudahy into investing in some worthless land belonging to Fibber and for Gildersleeve to trade his land for the airstrip. Bergen successfully convinces Hilary to fly into Wistful Vista. Meanwhile, Jerry and Marge, still searching for Julie, have decided that they are still in love and get married.
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Oak Park was formed from ranchland owned by Jim and Marian Jordan, stars of the radio show Fibber McGee and Molly. The land was purchased by Metropolitan Development Corporation in the 1960s. Homes were developed starting in the late 1960s. Kanan-Dume Road (named after a local family) was the only access road to the community, from Agoura Hills, California, in neighboring Los Angeles County.
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This became the basis of the book Fibber in the Heat. In October 2011, he again appeared in Mock the Week. Jupp had a cameo role in Johnny English Reborn in 2011, as an employee of MI7. He appeared in Series 4, Episode 4 of the comedy panel game Argumental, which aired on 24 November 2011. In 2012, he appeared again on Mock the Week.
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Bergen agrees to write Fibber a check on the condition that it not be cashed until he has a chance to investigate Cadwalader. As soon as Bergen leaves, however, Cadwalader snatches the check out of Fibber's hands. As the party progresses, Abigail Uppington, dressed as an Indian, begins to recite "The Song of Hiawatha." Bergen notices a branch Uppington has clutched in her hand.
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However, when Wimple confides that his formula doesn't work, Molly approaches Cadwalader about returning Bergen's money. Meanwhile, Bergen informs Jean of his disappointment when he discovers that the cocoons are too brittle to unweave. Soon after, Fibber arrives with a sample of the formula and the bad news about Wimple's discovery. In the rush of everything that is happening, Charlie accidentally spills the formula on the cocoons.
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Having been a cast member of the First Nighter radio show, he moved to Los Angeles when the show also moved to Los Angeles. Throughout his career, he appeared on popular radio shows including The Jack Benny Program, Lux Radio Theatre, Fibber McGee and Molly, and The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show. In animation, Mather occasionally did voice work for George Pal and UPA.
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The success of Glo-Coat bolstered the company during the Great Depression. S. C. Johnson’s line of wax-reliant products necessitated Herbert Fisk Johnson Jr.’s 1935 expedition to Fortaleza, Brazil to find a direct sustainable source of wax. From April 1935 until May 1950, the company was the sponsor for the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show, officially known as The Johnson Wax Program.
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He can make hair change in shape and thickness which can be cancelled out by rain. In the English dub, Furdinand speaks in the style of Bill Thompson's character Wallace Wimple from Fibber McGee and Molly. ;Nosirs : :A group of big-nosed Yo-kai who disrupt Nate's class while they are having an exam, making them doubt themselves. The Nosirs appear to be malicious, but they only want to help people.
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The stars of the program were real-life husband and wife team James "Jim" Jordan (1896–1988)Ancestry.com. California Death Index, 1940–1997 [database on-line]. Provo, UT: The Generations Network, Inc., 2000."Jim Jordan, Radio's Fibber McGee, Is Dead at 91", The New York Times, April 2, 1988, p. 10. and Marian Driscoll Jordan (1898–1961),"Marion Jordan, Radio Star, Dies", The New York Times, April 8, 1961, p. 19.
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They pretend to be rich, with Gildersleeve playing their butler. The "corner of 14th and Oak" in downtown Wistful Vista was routinely given as a location for various homes, places of business and government buildings throughout the show's run. Whenever someone asks the time it's always half-past. McGee has a reputation for telling tall tales, and there are occasional jokes linking this propensity to his name "Fibber".
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Bill Davenport served as head writer for this series. The only radio alumnus to appear as a regular cast member was Harold Peary, who took the role of Mayor La Trivia. The TV version's main asset was character comic Bob Sweeney, who caught the spirit and cadence of Jim Jordan's "Fibber" delivery, alternating between cheerful, boastful, and fretful. Veteran screen actor Addison Richards made a good foil as Doc Gamble.
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Even while young, Randolph specialized in middle-aged "grand dame" roles on stage and radio, continuing in these roles when she entered films in 1940. She re-created her character of Mrs. Uppington in RKO's Look Who's Laughing in 1941 and Here We Go Again in 1942, both spin- offs of the Fibber McGee and Molly radio series. In 1943, she co-starred in the Republic musical O, My Darling Clementine.
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Ken Darby's choral group, The Ken Darby Singers, sang backup for Bing Crosby on the original 1942 Decca Records studio recording of "White Christmas." In 1940 they also sang on the first album ever made of the songs from The Wizard of Oz, a film on which Darby had worked. However, the album was a studio cast recording, not a true soundtrack album (although it did feature Judy Garland), and it did not use the film's original arrangements. Darby also performed as part of "The King's Men," a vocal quartet who recorded several songs with Paul Whiteman's orchestra in the mid 1930s and were the featured vocalists on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio program from 1940 through 1953. In the early 1940s, he performed with the King's Men a musical version of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" that he wrote called "T'was the Night Before Christmas" that was performed on the Christmas episodes of "Fibber McGee and Molly".
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The National Audio Theatre Festivals, Inc. (NATF) evolved from its predecessor, the Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop. In 1979, a number of radio theater enthusiasts, based around community radio station KOPN, decided to stage a teaching workshop on the radio arts.Richard Fish, "Genesis and Renaissance: A Brief History of Radio Theater" The host was Jim Jordan, of Fibber McGee and Molly fame, and also included Firesign Theatre regulars David Ossman and Peter Bergman.
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In the 1940s, she found work in radio, trading banter with Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, W.C. Fields and Rudy Vallee, among others. Pitts' activities on radio included playing Miss Mamie Wayne in the soap opera Big Sister. She also was heard as Miss Pitts on The New Lum and Abner Show. She appeared several times in the earliest Fibber McGee and Molly show, playing a dizzy dame constantly looking for a husband.
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Jim Jordan married Gretchen Stewart (the widow of Yogi Yorgesson) after Marian's death. Gretchen and the Jordan children donated the manuscripts of Smackout and Fibber McGee and Molly to Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications after his death in 1988. Perhaps fittingly for his longtime radio alter ego, Jordan died on April Fool's Day. The show has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next to the NBC studios where the show was performed.
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In New York, Edgar Bergen does his last radio performance of the season, a doctor's sketch with his puppet, Charlie McCarthy, and his assistant, Julie Patterson (Lucille Ball). After the performance Bergen hosts an engagement party for Julie and his business partner, Jerry Wood. The next day, Bergen and Charlie are set for their summer vacation. Flying in his new aircraft, Bergen gets lost and lands in Wistful Vista, home of Fibber McGee and Molly.
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The Great Gildersleeve is a radio situation comedy broadcast in the United States from August 31, 1941 to 1958. Initially written by Leonard Lewis Levinson,Our Neighbors in Wistful Vista it was one of broadcast history's earliest spin-off programs. The series was built around Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, a regular character from the radio situation comedy Fibber McGee and Molly. The character was introduced in the October 3, 1939, episode (number 216) of that series.
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Philco Radio Time premiered on Wednesday October 16, 1946 on the newly formed American Broadcasting Company. Bob Hope was the program's first guest. The program had an audience rating of 16.1 during the season which made it one of the network's top shows but left it outside the top twenty. Fibber McGee and Molly again topped the Hooper ratings with 30.2 but they had to share the position with The Pepsodent Show starring Bob Hope.
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In the early-to-mid-1950s, Zenimura was instrumental in negotiating the professional baseball contracts of several Japanese-American players in the Central League and Pacific League including contracts for Satoshi "Fibber" Hirayama and his own sons Howard Kenso Zenimura and Harvey Kenshi Zenimura. The three later played in Japan for the Hiroshima Carp baseball team. Kenichi Zenimura continued to manage until his death in an automobile accident on November 13, 1968, in Fresno, California.
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Orloff was born in Los Angeles, California, where he was raised in a "Hollywood" family. His father, also named John Orloff, was a TV commercial director. His grandmother was B-movie actress Peggy Knudsen, and his great-grandparents were the real-life married couple of Fibber McGee and Molly, stars of TV and radio. Orloff studied screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles Film School, and on graduation went to work in the advertising business.
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Both of these classic sound effects were performed by Ed Ludes and Virgil Rhymer, the Hollywood- based NBC staff sound effects creators. Exactly what tumbled out of McGee's closet each time was never clear (except to these sound-effects men), but what signaled the end of the avalanche was always the same sound: a clear, tiny, household hand bell and McGee's inevitable post-collapse lament. "Fibber McGee's closet" entered the American vernacular as a catchphrase synonymous with household clutter.
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In the January 1948 Nielson ratings, the show was ranked #12 among all radio programs, ahead of such popular shows as Suspense, Sam Spade, Mr. District Attorney, The FBI in Peace and War, Blondie and Mr. and Mrs. North. It also was in the Top 10 of all radio shows more times than any other that year except for The Bob Hope Show and Fibber McGee and Molly. His audience was estimated anywhere from 10-20 million listeners.
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The series was used by owner Vincent Sullivan's Magazine Enterprises to try out a number of potential characters and titles, as well as reprinting newspaper strips such as Texas Slim, Kerry Drake and Teena. Several original A-1 titles succeeded and were given their own titles, including Tim Holt and The Ghost Rider. Issues were devoted to Thun'da, Cave Girl, and Strongman. Title that didn't do well included Dick Powell Adventurer, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Jimmy Durante Comics.
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Harold (Hal) Peary (July 25, 1908 – March 30, 1985) was an American actor, comedian and singer in radio, films, television, and animation. His most memorable role is as Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, which began as a supporting character on radio's Fibber McGee and Molly in 1938. The character proved to be so popular with audiences by 1941 that Peary got his own radio comedy show, The Great Gildersleeve, the first known spin-off hit in American broadcasting history.
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By Saturday morning, Quinn had the first draft of the script ready, which "Fibber" read, and then Quinn revised into the final, working script. He did this Sunday night, working all night and finishing Monday morning, when the cast would gather at NBC's Hollywood studios, and rehearsed for 2 hours. After this, Quinn made any final changes. Tuesday morning the entire cast (including Billy Mils' orchestra) would run through the script about 4 times, ending with a complete run-through at 3 pm.
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Johnson Wax sponsored the show through 1950; Pet Milk through 1952; and, until the show's final half- hour episode in mid-1953, Reynolds Aluminum. Fibber sometimes referred to Harlow as "Harpo". The show also used two musical numbers per episode to break the comedy routines into sections. For most of the show's run, there would be one vocal number by The King's Men (a vocal quartet: Ken Darby, Rad Robinson, Jon Dodson and Bud Linn), and an instrumental by The Billy Mills Orchestra.
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Page was a radio actress and singer before being signed to a Hollywood film contract by Warner Brothers in 1938. She sang on a Spokane station before getting a job on KYW radio in Chicago, Illinois, subsequently moving to NBC, where her network activities included singing on Fibber McGee and Molly. Page was cast as blues singer Gertrude Lamont in the 1935 soap opera Masquerade. Beginning on May 27, 1936, she played Gloria Marsh on the soap opera Today's Children.
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The series was nearing the end of its first year when Hurt suddenly died of a heart attack, aged 40, bringing an abrupt end to the initial run.Stumpf, Charles and Tom Price. Heavenly Days! The Story of Fibber McGee and Molly, World of Yesterday Publications, 1987, (Beulah would continue, but after a brief stint with Bob Corley as the lead, actual black women starred in the title role from 1947 onward.) He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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Here We Go Again is a 1942 American film, a sequel to Look Who's Laughing. With RKO in financial trouble, with the success of the earlier zany comedy starring a bevy of radio stars, Here We Go Again put Fibber McGee and Molly in a search for where to celebrate the couple's 20th anniversary. They want to throw a big party but when everyone declines their invitation, they decide to go on a second honeymoon instead. Craddock 2001, p. 441.
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Most early radio shows in the United States were recorded in the presence of a studio audience, including comedies such as The Jack Benny Program, The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, and Fibber McGee and Molly, as well as anthology series like The Mercury Theatre and Lux Radio Theatre. In its earliest days, most television broadcasts stemmed from the world of New York theater. Stage veterans were experienced in performing for a crowd. Starting in the 1940s, these plays were broadcast live.
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Mornings and afternoons had smaller audiences (chiefly housewives), who listened to 61 soap operas. Phone-in talk shows were rare, but disk jockeys attracted a following through their chatter between records. The most popular radio shows during the Golden Age of Radio included The Jack Benny Program, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Goldbergs and other top-rated American radio shows heard by 30–35 percent of the radio audience.Alice Goldfarb Marquis, "Radio Grows Up", American Heritage (Aug/Sep1983) 34#5 pp 64-80.
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The popularity of the song is lampooned in a 1940s film short. In the film, The King's Men (who also performed on Fibber McGee and Molly), play young men living in a boarding house who are endlessly singing the song while getting dressed, eating dinner, playing cards, etc., until an exasperated fellow boarder finally has them removed to an insane asylum. The song is featured in the movies From Here to Eternity, Ace in the Hole, and A Christmas Story.
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Perry Como began performing on radio in 1936 when he became a member of the Ted Weems Orchestra. The band had its own weekly radio show on the Mutual Broadcasting System from 1936 to 1937. They were also part of the regularly featured cast of Fibber McGee and Molly. Ted Weems and his Orchestra were cast members for the first season of the radio show Beat the Band, which was a musical quiz show; they were weekly performers from 1940 – 1941.
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When it first hit the radio waves, the character of Beulah was voiced by her creator, Marlin Hurt, a white male; the character was originally introduced nationwide as a supporting character on Fibber McGee and Molly before getting her own show. After Hurt's unexpected death in 1946, the character of Beulah was played by Bob Corley, another white man. In 1947, African American actress Hattie McDaniel took over, followed by two African American sisters Lillian Randolph and later Amanda Randolph.
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At 23, Frank moved to Chicago and worked as a bellboy for the Edgewater Beach Hotel. While working in Illinois, Frank owned a dry cleaners in Evanston, Illinois and had a night job as a theater set mover. For his musical career following his wife's persuasion, he became a booking agent for radio stars such as Fibber McGee and Molly, Gene Autry, and Amos 'n' Andy. This was for the WLS Roundup, where he was a show producer starting in 1928.
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The Great Gildersleeve premiered on NBC on August 31, 1941. It moves the title character from the McGees' Wistful Vista to Summerfield, where Gildersleeve oversees his late sister and brother- in-law's estate (said to have both been killed in a car accident) and rears his orphaned niece and nephew, Marjorie and Leroy Forrester. The household also includes a cook named Birdie. While Gildersleeve had occasionally mentioned his (silent) wife in some Fibber episodes, in his own series he is a confirmed bachelor.
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I Love Lucy drew heavily from both film and radio. Many of the show's scripts were rewrites from Lucille Ball's late-1940s radio show My Favorite Husband. Shows like Gunsmoke and The Jack Benny Program ran concurrently on both radio and TV until television reception reached beyond the major metropolitan areas in the mid-1950s. while others, such as Father Knows Best and Fibber McGee and Molly, attempted to "flash- cut" from radio to television, to varying degrees of success.
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Holloway acted on many radio programs, including The Railroad Hour, The United States Steel Hour, Suspense and Lux Radio Theater. In the late 1940s, he could be heard in various roles on NBC's "Fibber McGee and Molly". His voice retained a touch of its Southern drawl and was instantly recognizable. Holloway was chosen to narrate many children's records, including Uncle Remus Stories (Decca), Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes (Disneyland Records), Walt Disney Presents Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories (Disneyland Records) and Peter And The Wolf (RCA Victor).
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In 1938 he starred in a production of Jerome Kern's Roberta at the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera. Novis was also highly active as a singer with big bands and as a radio entertainer in the 1930s, including having his own program on NBC beginning on 15 June 1932. He performed frequently with Anson Weeks and his band and was often heard on the radio programme Fibber McGee and Molly. He also played Matt Mulligan in the old-time radio adaptation of Jumbo (1935-1936) on NBC.
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According to its current website as of February 22, 2008, the station announced a switchover from Big Band and Adult Standards to a smooth jazz format. "The Best of Old Time Radio" featuring vintage episodes of Fibber McGee and Molly, The Green Hornet, Lum and Abner, The Great Gildersleeve, Gunsmoke among others were also aired to coincide with its earlier formats. The format switch to smooth jazz took place on Saturday March 8, 2008. Overnight programming also included oldies from 12 midnight until early morning.
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Following a move to Chicago, Mitchell appeared in the network broadcast of The First Nighter Program and played small parts in various soap operas, including The Story of Mary Marlin and The Road of Life. After she moved to Los Angeles, she played opposite Joan Davis and Jack Haley in The Sealtest Village Store. She also starred as Louella in The Life of Riley and joined the cast of Fibber McGee and Molly as Alice Darling in 1943. She also played in The Charlotte Greenwood Show.
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Garry Moore rose to fame as Jimmy Durante's radio sidekick. Bert Parks was host of the radio hits Stop the Music and Break the Bank. Several radio comedy shows were revived in the form of regular five- minute Monitor segments, including Duffy's Tavern. Jim and Marian Jordan, better known as old-time radio favorites Fibber McGee and Molly, held down a regular Monitor segment and were said to be negotiating a new, long-term commitment to the show when Marian died of cancer in 1961.
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The song was made most famous by Vera Lynn and sung to troops during the war. It was a top ten hit in America for Kate Smith in 1942, and Glenn Miller recorded a version in November 1941. Jimmie Baker frequently performed it in Europe during the war, and the song was sung by the vocal group The King's Men on a 3 February 1942 episode of the Fibber McGee and Molly Show. Ray Eberle and Tex Beneke also included it in their repertoires.
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At the time, WWNC was an NBC affiliate, owned by the Asheville Citizen-Times. Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys played the daily 3:30-3:45 Mountain Music spot until April 1, 1939, when WWNC became a CBS affiliate and moved to the Asheville Citizen-Times building. At one time, the station was home to Amos and Andy, Fibber McGee and Molly and Jack Benny. In 1938, WWNC was one of the many stations broadcasting Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds.
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Fourth form boy Tolik Ryizhkov (Evaldas Mikaliunas) is a naughty child and fibber. Once he received a box of magic matches while hiding behind the iron door of a transformer booth. Every match, when broken, can act like a magic wand but just once. A boy with his two friends and a dog find themselves on an island of an evil wizard (Sergei Yevsyunin) of their age, who found the equal box of matches and used them to create his own little egocentric world.
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Ted Malone read poetry and Milton Cross conveyed children "Coast To Coast on a Bus", as well as bringing opera lovers the Saturday matinée Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. Cross would continue to host the Met on NBC, ABC, CBS and NPR until his passing at the beginning of 1975. Occasionally, a show would premiere on NBC Blue, which had a weaker lineup of stations nationwide, and be shifted to the Red Network if it grew in popularity. Fibber McGee and Molly is one example.
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Starting in the 1930s, WLS was an affiliate of the Blue Network of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC),Broadcasting 1935 Yearbook, Broadcasting. 1935. p. 29. Retrieved August 20, 2018. and as such aired the popular Fibber McGee and Molly and Lum and Abner comedy programs (both produced at the studios of Chicago's NBC-owned stations, WENR and WMAQ) during their early years. When the Federal Communications Commission forced NBC to sell the Blue Network, WLS maintained its affiliation with the network under its new identity, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).
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A character shot of Fibber and Molly, 1937. For most of the show's history, the usual order of the show was the introduction followed by a Johnson Wax plug by Harlow then his introduction to the first part of the script (usually 11 minutes). Billy Mills usually followed with an instrumental (or accompanied by Martha Tilton in 1941). The musical interlude would seguess into the second part of the script, followed by a performance (by the vocal group, the Kings Men - occasionally featuring a solo by leader Ken Darby).
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Molly opens the closet looking for the dictionary and is promptly buried in Fibber's "stuff" ("arranged in there just the way I want it"). Cleaning out the closet becomes the show's plot, inventorying much of the contents along the way: a photo album, a rusty horseshoe, a ten-foot pole. After repacking the closet, Fibber realizes the dictionary has been put away too—and he opens the closet again, causing an avalanche. This episode also features a cameo by Gracie Allen, running for president on the Surprise Party ticket.
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For a short time in the early 1940s, Martha Tilton would sing what was formerly the instrumental. Before and during America's involvement in World War II, references to or about the war and the members of the Axis Powers were commonplace on the show. Just after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Jim Jordan, out of character, soberly ended the Fibber McGee show by inviting the studio audience to sing "America". During the show of December 9, the Mayor is seeking a globe in order to keep up with current events.
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Jupp won So You Think You're Funny?, Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year in 2001, and was a Perrier Award "Best Newcomer" nominee in 2003, for his show Gentlemen Prefer Brogues. He claimed to have bluffed his way onto an England cricket tour to India, as the cricket correspondent for BBC Scotland, and the Western Mail during his appearance on Celebrity Mastermind, and again in an appearance on Test Match Special in 2011. He wrote a book about his adventures as a cricket journalist in India: Fibber in the Heat.
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He was cast that same year as Martin Kingsley in two episodes of the NBC western series, Cimarron City. He appeared as Doc Gamble in three episodes of the radio series made briefly into a 1959 NBC sitcom, Fibber McGee and Molly. From 1960 to 1961, he appeared as Doc Landy in eight episodes of the NBC western series, the Deputy, with Henry Fonda and Allen Case. Richards portrayed Mark Stacy in the 1960 episode "Dennis and the Bees" of the CBS sitcom, Dennis the Menace, starring Jay North.
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The original investors included Walt Disney, his brother Roy, Jack Benny, Bing Crosby, George Burns, Charles Laughton, Burl Ives, Art Linkletter, John Payne, Spike Jones and Jim and Marion Jordan (Fibber McGee and Molly). There are some sources that suggest Walt Disney Company used the business as a training facility for its employees prior to deployment to Disney World.Walt Disney World Trivia Walt Disney and the original investors built the Celebrity's complex at a cost of $6 million. The bowling lanes opened first in 1960 and the rest of the center opened in 1961.
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Benny often made public appearances in Maxwells. He drove a Maxwell onto the stage in one of his last television specials. By 1941, Jack Benny's Maxwell had become such a well-known aspect of popular culture that it was referenced in the Billy Mills song "I'm in Love with the Sound Effects Man" as heard on the June 17, 1941, Fibber McGee and Molly radio show (and later performed on a 1943 recording by Spike Jones). The automobile was also featured in the 1943 Benny film The Meanest Man in the World.
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Throckmorton Philharmonic Gildersleeve (as portrayed by Harold Peary, later replaced by Willard Waterman in 1950) was an antagonist on the long-running radio comedy Fibber McGee & Molly around 1939. The pompous underwear salesman proved popular enough to warrant a spin-off, The Great Gildersleeve, in 1941. Like its parent show, Gildersleeve would go on to a long run in radio, film and (briefly) television; the last episode of Gildersleeve aired in 1958.The Great Gildersleeve by Charles Stumpf and Ben Ohmart, 157 pp, illustrated, BearManor Media, (Albany, Georgia).
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During her time in Hollywood, Tyler was well known as a "girl about town" being seen at some of Tinsel Town's most popular nightclubs with such leading men as Mickey Rooney, Rory Calhoun, and Peter Lawford. Tyler was a Democrat and supported Adlai Stevenson's campaign during the 1952 presidential election.Motion Picture and Television Magazine, November 1952, page 33, Ideal Publishers In May 1962, she married Jim Jordan, Jr., the son of the famed 1930s radio couple Fibber McGee and Molly, and had a son and three daughters. They remained married until his death in December 1998.
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Fibber McGee and Molly was a 1935–1959 American radio comedy series. The situation comedy was a staple of the NBC Red Network from 1936 on after having begun on NBC Blue in 1935. One of the most popular and enduring radio series of its time, it ran as a stand-alone series from 1935 to 1956, and then continued as a short-form series as part of the weekend Monitor from 1957 to 1959. The title characters were created and portrayed by Jim and Marian Jordan, a real-life husband and wife team that had been working in radio since the 1920s.
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Fibber McGee and Molly originated 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.
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Jordan also played a regular customer named Jim and Marian Jordan portrayed the main roles as Teeny, a little girl and regular customer, and Marian, Jim's girlfriend. Smackout was broadcast from Chicago's NBC radio affiliate WMAQ before becoming nationally syndicated through the NBC Blue Network beginning in April 1933. New episodes of Smackout were broadcast six days a week from March 2, 1931, to August 30, 1935. The series, after capturing the eye of the wife of an executive at Johnson Wax, was the basis to Jim and Marian Jordan's more successful and memorable radio series Fibber McGee and Molly.
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Born in Indianapolis, Gillette was raised in Peoria, Illinois and then Chicago in the 1920s. He began singing and playing drums in local bands, often alongside his friend Ken Nelson with whom he formed a vocal trio, the Campus Kids. He joined the orchestra for the radio show Fibber McGee and Molly, moving in 1939 to Hollywood, where he met Glenn Wallichs, who recorded the show on transcription discs. Gillette went back to Chicago to work in radio, but, after Wallichs co-founded Capitol Records in 1942, Gillette returned to California to head its country music artists and repertoire section.
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The recordings led to a string of notorious gigs in Dublin rock venues such as Fibber Magees (Parnell Street) and Barnstormers (a biker bar on Capel Street). A bidding war began as U.K. and International record companies tried to sign them. The band almost signed with Mo Wax but eventually went with Island Records as it was home to some of their musical heroes. They recorded a debut album that included contributions from Howie B, Tricky and Cutmaster Swift; but were then dropped by Island Records, who kept the rights to the album but did not release it.
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Bob Clampett took Avery's scenario and altered it for his film Tortoise Wins by a Hare released on February 20, 1943. The title is an appropriate pun on "hair". Bugs again challenges Cecil to a race after viewing footage from their previous encounter two years earlier (which seems to depict Cecil as having won fairly instead of by cheating Bugs with his cousins). Bugs then goes to Cecil's tree home disguised as an old man (a parody of Bill Thompson's "Old Timer" character from the radio series Fibber McGee and Molly) to ask the turtle his secret.
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The producers originally rejected him for the part because of his ubiquitous presence on so many radio dramas and the familiarity of his voice, but his impressive audition could not be dismissed, and he became the obvious choice for the role. Conrad voiced Dillon for the show's nine-year run, and he wrote the June 1953 episode "Sundown." When Gunsmoke was adapted for television in 1955, executives at CBS did not cast Conrad or his radio costars despite a campaign to get them to change their minds. His other credits include Suspense, Lux Radio Theater, and Fibber McGee and Molly.
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Many from the show remember that he would wait until the last minute then lock himself in his office with a big plate of sandwiches, a huge pot of coffee, and two cartons of cigarettes. And hours later, he would emerge with a fresh script rarely in need of revision. From the start of the show, Quinn was full partner and by 1941, the Jordans and Quinn were splitting a $6000 paycheck three ways. Fibber McGee co-star Gale Gordon once recalled that Quinn would sometimes send his ideas to other radio comedians including Fred Allen.
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The program was produced at WMAQ from 1935 to 1939, when the show moved to California. (RealPlayer) During its first months on the air, Fibber McGee and Molly was distributed over NBC's Blue Network, which meant that in Chicago the program was produced at WMAQ but heard over WLS, one of three NBC Blue Network affiliates in Chicago at the time. Amos 'n' Andy was also a popular program that continued being broadcast from Chicago until 1938, when the program moved to Hollywood. Both of these shows moved production to the new NBC West Coast Radio City.
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After joining Jim and Marian Jordan (as Fibber McGee and Molly) and fellow radio favorite Edgar Bergen in Look Who's Laughing (1941) and Here We Go Again (1942), Peary received top billing for a brief series of RKO films. The Great Gildersleeve (1942) also carried Randolph from the radio cast to the screen, with Nancy Gates as Marjorie and Freddie Mercer as Leroy. Walter Tetley, who played Leroy on radio, could not appear on screen as Leroy because he was actually an adult playing a child character. Gildersleeve's Bad Day (1943) revolved around the mishaps when he is called to jury duty.
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Thompson was born to vaudevillian parents and was of Scottish ancestry. He began his career in Chicago radio, where his early appearances included appearances as a regular on Don McNeill's morning variety series The Breakfast Club in 1934 and a stint as a choir member on the musical variety series The Sinclair Weiner Minstrels around 1937. While on the former series, Thompson originated a meek, mush-mouthed character occasionally referred to in publicity as Mr. Wimple. Thompson soon achieved his greatest fame after he joined the cast of the radio comedy Fibber McGee and Molly around 1936.
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Thompson entertaining at a US Navy benefit in 1953 Around 1943, however, Thompson's thriving career was interrupted when he joined the US Navy during World War II, and all of his radio characters were temporarily dropped. He returned to Fibber McGee full- time in 1946, however, and also became a semi-regular on Edgar Bergen's radio series as lecturer "Professor" Thompson. On February 21, 1950, he married Mary Margaret McBride. Thompson continued to work on radio until the late 1950s, notably in several episodes of CBS Radio Workshop, and his animation voice- over career also began to build steam during the 1950s.
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Lincoln began working professionally in the early 1920s. In the 1920s and 1930s he spent time playing with Adrian Rollini's California Ramblers (and was the replacement trombonist for Tommy Dorsey), as well as with Arthur Lange, Ace Brigode, Roger Wolfe Kahn, Paul Whiteman, and Ozzie Nelson. As a studio musician, Abe most prominently performed occasional solos and dixieland-stylings during the musical portions on the Old Time Radio show on NBC, Fibber McGee and Molly from the mid-40s until 1953 with the Billy Mills Orchestra. In the 1930s and into the 1940s he work primarily in Los Angeles studios as a sideman.
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Initial press releases stated that Jim Jordan, Jr. would be the director, but he became a consultant, along with the radio show's original creator, Don Quinn. The TV version was produced by William Asher for NBC (and co-sponsored by Singer Corporation and Standard Brands). Neither of the Jordans, nor Phil Leslie (the head writer by the end of the radio series), took part in the series. The decision was made to recast both roles, with younger actors Bob Sweeney and Cathy Lewis as Fibber and Molly respectively; Lewis had previously played Jane Stacy, a very similar straight-woman character, on the radio version of My Friend Irma.
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Early sitcoms took the forms of recurring comedy sketches with running characters, which on national network shows often took the form of a broader variety show with vocal and instrumental music performances padding out a half-hour time slot. The Jack Benny Program, a radio-TV comedy series that ran for more than three decades, is generally regarded as a high-water mark in 20th-century American comedy. Fibber McGee and Molly was one of radio's most popular sitcoms of the 1940s. The weekly half-hour domestic sitcom starring real-life husband and wife Jim Jordan and Marian Driscoll ran from 1935 to 1956 on NBC.
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In 1939 Chase created an arrangement of "I Got Rhythm" (from the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy) for a Pops concert played by the Kansas Philharmonic (now the Kansas City Symphony) while he was a member of the violin section. The arrangement was enormously successful and he took it as an example of his work to NBC Radio in Chicago, where he was initially hired as a part-time violinist and music arranger. Within a short time, he was employed full-time as a staff musician, arranger and conductor. Among the popular shows for which he worked were The Red Skelton Show, Fibber McGee and Molly, and The Carnation Contented Hour.
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Originally portrayed by a white male actor, Marlin Hurt, Beulah Brown first appeared in 1939 when Hurt introduced and played the character on the Hometown Incorporated radio series and in 1940 on NBC radio's Show Boat series. In 1943, Beulah moved over to That's Life and then became a supporting character on the popular Fibber McGee and Molly radio series in late 1944. In 1945, Beulah was spun off into her own radio show, The Marlin Hurt and Beulah Show, with Hurt still in the role. Beulah was employed as a housekeeper and cook for the Henderson family: father Harry, mother Alice and son Donnie.
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Aneta Corsaut (the future Helen Crump on The Andy Griffith Show) appeared in 13 episodes as Irma Howell, a professor's wife. Karyn Kupcinet played a young fellow student of Sarah Green. Her role is very small, and she is heard saying very little dialogue. The plot centers around Sarah Green, a widow in her early sixties, who decides to acquire higher education, matriculates in her hometown college and interacts with, among others, her Cambridge University exchange professor (Cedric Hardwicke) and next-door neighbor George Howell Paul Smith, a character analogous to Smith's Roy Norris from Fibber McGee and Molly, complete with a no-nonsense wife (Aneta Corsaut).
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Chicagoans arrived by a special railway car to see the featured film "The Last Frontier" and the Vaudeville acts of Fibber McGee and Molly. Patrons also heard a recital on the famous $25,000 Marr and Colton silver and red organ, which was adorned with carved flamingos. The Arcada became known as one of the outstanding Vaudeville houses in the Fox River Valley. Many legendary stars have graced the stage, including George Burns and Gracie Allen, Judy Garland, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Olivia DeHavilland, the John Phillip Sousa Band, Liberace, Mitzi Gaynor, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Vincent Price, Carol Channing, Jeanette MacDonald, Walter Slezak and the Von Trapp Family Singers.
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Smackout, a revised version of Luke and Mirandy centered around Jim Jordan in the role of Luke Gray, a proprietor of a general store that was brimming with stock but yet "smack out" of everything, who loved to tell a good tall tale to his customers. The program was picked up by NBC's Blue Network for national syndication in 1933 and remained there until the summer of 1935. After the wife of a Johnson Wax executive heard the program, the Jordans, and Quinn, moved to their more memorable radio series Fibber McGee and Molly. Quinn was famous for delaying the actual writing of the scripts.
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Weems moved to Chicago with his band around 1928. The Ted Weems Orchestra had more chart success in 1929 with the novelty song "Piccolo Pete", which rewarded him with his second Gold Record, and the #1 hit "The Man from the South". The band gained popularity in the 1930s, making regular radio broadcasts. These included Jack Benny's Canada Dry program on CBS and NBC during the early 1930s, and the Fibber McGee & Molly program in the late 1930s. In 1936, the Ted Weems Orchestra gave singer Perry Como his first national exposure; Como recorded with the band (on Decca Records), beginning his long and successful career.
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Avery had used a similar gag in his Merrie Melodies short Tortoise Beats Hare (1941), which in turn was an expansion/exaggeration of the premise of his The Blow Out (1936). In fact, this cartoon shows that early ideas about Droopy's personality were already germinating, as that film's Cecil Turtle has similarities to Droopy. Droopy's meek, deadpan voice and personality were modeled after the character Wallace Wimple on the radio comedy Fibber McGee and Molly; actor Bill Thompson, who played Wimple, was the original voice of Droopy. During his time in the US Navy during World War II, the role was played by other voice actors, including Don Messick, who reprised the role in the 1990s.
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Radio Daily Corp. P. 934. The Red Buttons Show, Road of Life, Omnibus,Alicoate, Jack, Ed. (1955). The 1955 Radio and Television Yearbook. Radio Daily Corp. P. 1173. Wide Wide World, State Trooper,Alicoate, Jack, Ed. (1957). The 1957 Radio Annual and Television Year Book. Radio Daily Corp. P. 1196. Jane Wyman Theater,Alicoate, Jack, Ed. (1958). The 1958 Radio Annual and Television Year Book. Radio Daily Corp. P. 1117. Sammy Kaye Show, Tic-Tac-Dough,Alicoate, Jack, Ed. (1959). The 1959 Radio Annual and Television Year Book. Radio Daily Corp. P. 1212. Fibber McGee and Molly, True Story, M Squad, The Arthur Murray Party, Saber of London, and Modern Romances.Alicoate, Charles A., Ed. (1960).
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In 1953, Marian Jordan's periodic health problems necessitated the shortening of Fibber McGee and Molly into a nightly fifteen-minute program, recorded without a studio audience in single sessions, the better to enable Jordan to rest. This timing was sadly appropriate, as classic radio had entered its dying days. Still, the McGees remained favorite presences on radio even after the quarter-hour edition ended in 1956, appearing in five-minute shorts from 1957 to 1959 on the NBC's Monitor radio program as Just Molly and Me. Radio historian Gerald S. Nachman has written that the Jordans anticipated renewing their contract with NBC for another three years when Marian's battle against ovarian cancer ended with her death in 1961.
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Marlin Hurt Marlin Hurt (May 27, 1905 - March 21, 1946) was an American stage entertainer and radio actor who was best known for originating the dialect comedy role of Beulah made famous on the Fibber McGee and Molly program and the first season of the Beulah radio series. A saxophone player and vocalist, Hurt was a singer with the Vincent Lopez band and on records with Frank Trumbauer's jazz group before becoming part of a vocal trio with Bud and Gordon Vandover billed as "Tom, Dick, and Harry". When the act was dissolved due to Bud Vandover's death in 1943, Hurt became a solo performer with a combination of saxophone and dialect humor.
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He toured the country in 1945 with the cast of other Quiz Kids "child prodigies", and those performances led to other opportunities on radio, such as his role as Magnus Proudfoot on the early radio version of Gunsmoke. He also performed on Fibber McGee and Molly, The Fred Allen Show, The Halls of Ivy, Our Miss Brooks, Suspense, William Shakespeare—A Portrait in Sound, The Zero Hour, and on an array of other radio programs. Easton's voice acting on radio continued for decades to come. As late as 2008, at the age of 78, he performed as the scheming character Bart Rathbone on numerous episodes of Adventures in Odyssey, a radio drama series for children.
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Yogi, Quick Draw, Huck and the rest of the gang encounter a variety of villains such as Captain Swashbuckle Swipe, Smokestack Smog, Lotta Litter, the Envy Brothers, Mr. Hothead, Dr. Bigot (and his henchmen Professor Haggling and Professor Bickering), the Gossipy Witch of the West, J. Wantum Vandal, the Sheik of Selfishness, Commadore Phineas P. Fibber, I.M. Sloppy, Peter D. Cheater, Mr. Waste, Hilarious P. Prankster, and the Greedy Genie, who act as their friends, hosts and/or guests, but embody some of the most common human faults and vices. Yogi and crew would often put up with them which ends with the villains either being repelled or outdone by their actions.
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In February 1951, the National Association of Retail Druggists named Peavey "America's Favorite Neighborhood Druggist" in recognition that coincided with LeGrand's 50th anniversary in show business. He later was a regular on Fibber McGee and Molly as Ole, the Elk's Club janitor, beginning February 15, 1949 just as that show began its decline, and appeared as Phil Harris' father on the Phil Harris Alice Faye Show (using the Peavey voice) from March 1954 until the end of that series in May of that year. He also performed roles on One Man's Family and the Hollywood version of I Love a Mystery. LeGrand also portrayed Peavey in three of the Great Gildersleeve movies.
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Born Charles Thomas Aldrich Jr., in New York City to vaudevillian Charles Thomas Aldrich and his wife, English actress Gloria Gordon, Gale Gordon's first big radio break came via the recurring roles of "Mayor La Trivia" and "Foggy Williams" on Fibber McGee and Molly, before playing Rumson Bullard on the show's successful spinoff, The Great Gildersleeve. Gordon and his character of Mayor La Trivia briefly left the show during WWII in when Gordon enlisted in the US Coast Guard, where he spent four years. He was the first actor to play the role of Flash Gordon, in the 1935 radio serial The Amazing Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon. He also played Dr. Stevens in Glorious One.
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In Chicago he became a regular on Fibber McGee and Molly, where he originated the Gildersleeve character as a McGee neighbor and nemesis in 1938. ("You're a haaa-aa-aard man, McGee" was a famous catch-phrase.) The character actually went through several first names and occupations before settling on Throckmorton Philharmonic Gildersleeve and his ownership of the Gildersleeve Girdleworks. He also worked on the horror series Lights Out and other radio programs, but his success and popularity as Gildersleeve set the stage for the character's own program, which became the peak of his career. Peary's Gildersleeve proved popular enough that it was thought to try the character in his own show.
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Peary at right as a guest star on Petticoat Junction, 1969 In addition to the four Gildersleeve films, Peary appeared in the Walt Disney movie A Tiger Walks (1964) and the Elvis Presley film Clambake (1967). He also worked in television, playing murderer Freddy Fell in the 1965 Perry Mason episode, "The Case of the Lover's Gamble." That same year he played Peabody in the Rod Serling-scripted "Sheriff of Fetterman's Crossing" episode of Lloyd Bridges' Western series The Loner. He also appeared in recurring roles in several sitcoms, such as Herb Woodley in the TV version of Blondie, and as Mayor LaTrivia in the TV version of Fibber McGee and Molly,Brooks, Tim & Marsh, Earle (1979).
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On the other hand, the Jordans gladly cooperated in turning the show over to a half- hour devoted entirely to patriotic music on the day of the D-Day invasion in 1944, with the couple speaking only at the opening and the closing of the broadcast. This show remains available to collectors amidst many a Fibber McGee and Molly packaging. When the shows were broadcast overseas by the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS), all three commercials were eliminated from the program. Harlow Wilcox's middle ad was edited out, and the two advertisements at the beginning and end of the show were replaced by musical numbers, so that the show on AFRS would have two numbers by Billy Mills and the Orchestra, and two by The King's Men.
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Fibber McGee and Molly spun two supporting characters off into their own shows. By far the most successful and popular was Harold Peary's Gildersleeve, spun into The Great Gildersleeve in 1941. This show introduced single parenthood of a sort to creative broadcasting: the pompous, previously married Gildersleeve now moved to Summerfield, became single (although the missing wife was never explained), and raised his orphaned, spirited niece and nephew, while dividing his time between running his manufacturing business and (eventually) becoming the town water commissioner. In one episode, the McGees arrived in Summerfield for a visit with their old neighbor with hilarious results: McGee inadvertently learns Gildersleeve is engaged, and he practically needs to be chloroformed to perpetuate the secret a little longer.
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Colman's vocal talents contributed to National Broadcasting Company programming on D-Day, June 6, 1944. On that day, Colman read "Poem and Prayer for an Invading Army" written by Edna St. Vincent Millay for exclusive radio use by NBC. Beginning in 1945, Colman made many guest appearances on The Jack Benny Program on radio, alongside his second wife, stage and screen actress Benita Hume, whom he married in 1938. Their comedy work as Benny's perpetually exasperated next-door neighbours led to their own radio comedy The Halls of Ivy from 1950 to 1952, created by Fibber McGee & Molly mastermind Don Quinn, on which the Colmans played the literate, charming president of a middle American college and his former-actress wife.
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In addition to the general decline of scripted radio and the concurrent rise of television, Marian's health was beginning to fail. The show would transition to a pre-recorded daily sitcom from 1953 to 1956, then to a short-form weekly series (under the name Just Molly and Me) for Monitor from 1957 to 1959. In 1959, Fibber McGee and Molly was finally adapted for television, after years of resistance. Marian was too ill to continue, and for reasons unexplained (nothing in the radio series had identified the age of either of the McGees), neither Jim nor Don Quinn (nor Quinn's successor as head writer of the radio show, Phil Leslie) transitioned to the new series; new writers were brought in, and both the McGees were recast.
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Theater program from 1961 Among the qualities of their act, which according to one writer made them a rarity, was that they used both "snob and mob appeal," which gave them a wide audience. Nachman explains that they presented a new kind of comedy team, unlike previous comedy duos which had an intelligent member alongside a much less intelligent one, as with Laurel and Hardy, Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, and Martin and Lewis. What differentiated their style was the fact that their stage performance created "scenes," a method very unlike the styles of other acting teams. Nor did they rely on fixed gender or comic roles, but instead adapted their own character to fit a sketch idea they came up with.
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In 2014 Blabey signed a three-book deal with Scholastic Australia beginning with Pig the Pug, a humorous picture book about a rude, selfish, mean-spirited dog (pug), who always gets into arguments and even fights with his rival playmate, the friendly, polite- mannered, good-hearted Trevor (dachshund). The book was an immediate hit in Australia and has since been translated into many languages and published around the world. It spawned a series of Pig books including Pig the Fibber (2015), Pig the Winner (2016), Pig the Elf (2016), Pig the Star (2017), Pig the Grub (2018), Pig the Tourist (2019) and Pig the Slob (Blob) (2020). The Pig books have sold millions of copies around the world, predominantly in the USA and Australia.
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Morgan continued radio appearances, most often on the NBC weekend show NBC Monitor (1955–70), which also afforded final airings to longtime radio favorites Fibber McGee and Molly, until co-star Marian Jordan's death, as well as appearing as a guest panelist on other game shows produced by the Goodson-Todman team, including What's My Line?, To Tell the Truth and The Match Game. Morgan also took a turn hosting a radio quiz show, Sez Who, in 1959; the quiz involved guessing the famous voices making memorable comments that had been recorded over the years. Morgan had three bylines in Mad magazine in 1957-58, during the period when the magazine was adapting work from humorists such as Bob and Ray, Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar.
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The league in 1951-52 expanded to 11 teams, with such new teams as the Los Angeles Fibber McGee & Mollys, Artesia REA Travelers, and Santa Maria Golden Dukes. The Phillips 66ers just edged the Oakland Atlas-Pacific Engineers and the San Francisco Stewart Chevrolets for their fourth title, with a 17-5 record to their opponents 16-6 records that tied for second. The next season (1952-1953), the league dropped down to nine teams, but saw new opponents in the Houston Ada Oilers and the Los Angeles Kirby's Shoes. The Phillips 66ers edged the Peoria Caterpillars for the title by one game, with a 13-3 record. The Peoria Cats tied the Phillips 66ers for the 1953-54 title, each with a 10-4 record.
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Internet Movie Database. Full cast and crew for Salome (1923), Retrieved on June 29, 2009. Grauman used Marcelli in his various Los Angeles, California theaters until the advent of sound in the movies in the late 1920s removed a great number of musicians from their steady jobs. Marcelli worked in radio broadcasting as the first bandleader of the Fibber McGee and Molly show, during the years 1935–1936,Dunning, John. On The Air, Oxford University Press US, 1998, p. 246. and he directed the Rico Marcelli Symphony Orchestra in a series of outdoor concerts at Grant Park Band Shell in Chicago in the late 1930s and 1940s, with as many as 165,000 people showing up for a 1940 performance in which Marcelli's orchestra backed singer Paul Robeson.Paul Robeson Centennial Celebration.
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After the Major Bowes tour ended, Berner began working in network radio in Hollywood, with recurring roles on Fibber McGee & Molly and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. On The Jack Benny Program, she voiced one-time parts before joining the principal cast as the recurring characters of Jack Benny's girlfriend Gladys Zybisco, and wisecracking telephone operator Mabel Flapsaddle, who gossiped about Benny with her cohort Gertrude Gearshift (Bea Benaderet), while Benny waited impatiently on the other end of the line for them to connect his call. Intended as a one-time appearance, they began recurring roles in the 1945-46 season, and in early 1947, Berner and Benaderet momentarily took over the actual NBC switchboards in Hollywood for publicity photos. Other radio work included waitress Dreamboat Mulvany on Arthur's Place; Mrs.
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These characterizations, plus the Jordans' change from being singers/musicians to comic actors, pointed toward their future; it was at this time when Marian developed and perfected the radio character "Teeny". It was also at WENR where the Jordans met Donald Quinn, a cartoonist who was then working in radio, and the couple hired him as their writer in 1931. They regarded Quinn's contribution as important and included him as a full partner; the salary for Smackout and Fibber McGee and Molly was split between the Jordans and Quinn. While working on the WENR farm report, Jim Jordan heard a true story about a shopkeeper from Missouri whose store was brimming with stock, yet he claimed to be "smack out" of whatever a customer would ask him for.
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Fletcher Markle directing CBS Radio's Studio One (1948) On April 29, 1947, Fletcher Markle launched the 60-minute CBS Radio series with an adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Broadcast on Tuesdays, opposite Fibber McGee and Molly and The Bob Hope Show at 9:30 pm, ET, the radio series continued until July 27, 1948, showcasing such adaptations as Dodsworth, Pride and Prejudice, The Red Badge of Courage, and Ah, Wilderness. Top performers were heard on this series, including John Garfield, Walter Huston, Mercedes McCambridge, Burgess Meredith, and Robert Mitchum. CBS Radio received a Peabody Award for Studio One in 1947, citing Markle's choice of material and the authenticity of his adaptations "in a production, which at its best, is distinguished for its taste, restraint, and radio craftsmanship".
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The word originated in the jazz culture of the 1920s, in which it referred to the “groove” of a piece of music (its rhythm and “feel”), plus the response felt by its listeners. It can also reference the physical groove of a record in which the pick-up needle runs. Radio disk jockeys would announce playing “good grooves, hot grooves, cool grooves, etc.” when introducing a record about to play. Recorded use of the word in its slang context has been found dating back to September 30, 1941, when it was used on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio show; band leader Billy Mills used it to describe his summer vacation. In the 1941 song “Let me off Uptown” by Gene Krupa, Anita O’Day invites Roy Eldridge to “… come here Roy and get groovy”.
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Vintage shows and new audio productions in America are accessible more widely from recordings or by satellite and web broadcasters, rather than over conventional AM and FM radio. The National Audio Theatre Festival is a national organization and yearly conference keeping the audio arts—especially audio drama—alive, and continues to involve long-time voice actors and OTR veterans in its ranks. Its predecessor, the Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop, was first hosted by Jim Jordan, of Fibber McGee and Molly fame, and Norman Corwin advised the organization. One of the longest running radio programs celebrating this era is The Golden Days of Radio, which was hosted on the Armed Forces Radio Service for more than 20 years and overall for more than 50 years by Frank Bresee, who also played "Little Beaver" on the Red Ryder program as a child actor.
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The Jordans were experts at transforming the ethnic humor of vaudeville into more rounded comic characters, no doubt due in part to the affection felt for the famous supporting cast members who voiced these roles, including Bill Thompson (as the Old Timer and Wimple), Harold Peary (as Gildersleeve), Gale Gordon (as La Trivia), Arthur Q. Bryan (as Dr. Gamble; Bryan also voiced Elmer Fudd for the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons, which also borrowed lines from Fibber McGee and Molly from time to time), Isabel Randolph (as Mrs. Uppington), Marlin Hurt (a white male who played in dialect the McGee's maid, Beulah), and others. They were also expert at their own running gags and catchphrases, many of which entered the American vernacular: "That ain't the way I heeard it!"; "'T'ain't funny, McGee!" and "Heavenly days!" were the three best known.
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The Jordans' participation in Look Who's Laughing was set up in the Fibber McGee & Molly episode "Amusement Park" (6/17/41), in which Gale Gordon played an RKO pictures representative who followed the McGees around the amusement park and chose the McGees as a representative American couple to star in a movie with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The day before the film's real-life premiere in San Francisco, the movie had its fictional opening in Wistful Vista during that week's radio episode, and Bergen and McCarthy made a guest appearance ("Premiere of Look Who's Laughing" (11/11/41)). Look Who's Laughing has been released on VHS and DVD as part of the Lucille Ball RKO Collection. Here We Go Again has been released on VHS and was released on DVD on January 14, 2014, through Warner Archives.
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The writing was taut, and the casting, which had always been a strong point of the series (featuring such film stars as Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, Ronald Colman, Marlene Dietrich, Eve McVeagh, Lena Horne, and Cary Grant), took an unexpected turn when Lewis expanded the repertory to include many of radio's famous drama and comedy stars—often playing against type—such as Jack Benny. Jim and Marian Jordan of Fibber McGee and Molly were heard in the episode "Backseat Driver", which originally aired February 3, 1949. The highest production values enhanced Suspense, and many of the shows retain their power to grip and entertain. At the time he took over Suspense, Lewis was familiar to radio fans for playing Frankie Remley, the wastrel guitar-playing sidekick to Phil Harris in The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show.
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She made three movies with Kyser: That's Right—You're Wrong (1939) with Lucille Ball; You'll Find Out (1940) with Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff; and Playmates (1941) with John Barrymore and Lupe Vélez. On April 6, 1941, Simms and Kyser also co-starred in Niagara to Reno (described as "an original comedy") on CBS radio's Silver Theater. She nearly married Kyser but left his orchestra in September 1941 to do her own radio show. She starred in several more movies, including: Here We Go Again (1942) as Jean Gildersleeve, with Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, and Jim Jordan & Marian Jordan (from Fibber McGee & Molly); Hit the Ice (1943) as Marcia Manning, with Abbott & Costello; Broadway Rhythm (1944) as Helen Hoyt, with George Murphy; and the sanitized Cole Porter biopic Night and Day (1946) as Carole Hill, with Cary Grant and Alexis Smith.
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Writing proved the more lucrative of the two, so he abandoned singing in order to write for series like Fibber McGee & Molly and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, and later TV series like The Dennis Day Show, The Real McCoys, and The Andy Griffith Show. Henning was also the creator, writer, and producer of The Bob Cummings Show, where he met many of the actors who appeared in his later series. He produced the Ray Bolger Show, and wrote (or co-wrote) screenplays such as Lover Come Back (1961, for which he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Writing: original screenplay), and (with Stanley Shapiro) Bedtime Story (1964), which was re- made in 1988 as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (Steve Martin, Michael Caine), and again in 2019, as The Hustle (Anne Hathaway, Rebel Wilson).
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NBC Radio's last major programming push, in 1955, was Monitor, a continuous, all-weekend mixture of music, news, interviews and features with a variety of hosts, including such well-known television personalities as Dave Garroway, Hugh Downs, Ed McMahon, Joe Garagiola and Gene Rayburn. The potpourri also tried to keep vintage radio alive in featuring segments from Jim and Marian Jordan (in character as Fibber McGee and Molly), Ethel and Albert and iconoclastic satirist Henry Morgan. Monitor was a success for a number of years, but after the mid-1960s, local stations, especially in larger markets, became increasingly reluctant to break from their established formats to run non-conforming network programming. After Monitor went off the air in early 1975, there was little left of NBC Radio beyond hourly newscasts, news-related features and the half-hour-long Sunday morning religious program The Eternal Light.
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The size of his roles was mostly small and he did not even receive billing in the credits of some of his TV installments. Smith's earliest 1960s sitcom was CBS' Mrs. G. Goes to College, which marked Gertrude Berg's return to series TV in October 1961, after having portrayed a character, coincidentally also named "Molly", Molly Goldberg, on her long- running ethnic family sitcom, The Goldbergs, which predated the McGees' Molly by six years, having begun on radio in 1929, moved to CBS television in 1949 and ended in 1956. The plot centers around Sarah Green, a widow in her early sixties, who decides to acquire higher education, matriculates in her hometown college and interacts with, among others, her Cambridge University exchange professor (Cedric Hardwicke) and next-door neighbor George Howell, a character analogous to Smith's Roy Norris from Fibber McGee and Molly, replete with a no-nonsense wife (Aneta Corsaut).
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As with Fibber McGee, the new series could not come even close to the success of the original and, after thirteen episodes, a midseason move from Tuesday to Wednesday night, along a title change designed to emphasize Berg's name, The Gertrude Berg Show, was unable to improve the ratings for the remaining thirteen episodes and abruptly ended its run in April 1962, without showing any repeats. Although the show did receive two Emmy nominations, Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actress in a Series (Lead) for Gertrude Berg and Outstanding Performance in a Supporting Role by an Actress for Mary Wickes, co-star Cedric Hardwicke, in a 1962 TV Guide article which focuses on his work in the series, and references him as "Sir Cedric", is quoted as commenting, "if you're going to work in rubbish, you might as well get paid for it".McNeil, Alex (1996). Total Television.
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BBC's new Northern Ireland headquarters in Ormeau Avenue (Broadcasting House) were completed in 1939. thumb The Linen Quarter continues to host two of the city’s historic venues, alongside other popular music venues such as the Limelight, and some of the most famous pubs in the UK or Ireland such as the Crown Liquor Saloon, which is evidenced by its reputation as one of the most instagrammed landmarks in the UK. The bar is particularly renowned for its ten atmospheric snugs or booths which come with match-striking plates, an antique bell system to summon staff, and beautifully decorated mirrors. The Observatory bar in the Grand Central Hotel is the highest built bar in Ireland, and there are several bars that are renowned for their offering of live Irish music such as The Points and Fibber Maggee’s. Other well known bars include Pug Uglys, The Perch and Sweet Afton.
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The show lasted two years, with NBC losing around $1 million on the project (the network was only able to sell advertising time during the middle half-hour of the program each week). NBC's last major radio programming push, beginning on June 12, 1955, was Monitor, a creation of NBC President Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, who also created the innovative programs Today, The Tonight Show and Home for the companion television network. Monitor was a continuous all-weekend mixture of music, news, interviews, and features, with a variety of hosts including well-known television personalities Dave Garroway, Hugh Downs, Ed McMahon, Joe Garagiola, and Gene Rayburn. The potpourri show tried to keep vintage radio alive by featuring segments from Jim and Marian Jordan (in character as Fibber McGee and Molly); Peg Lynch's dialog comedy Ethel and Albert (with Alan Bunce); and iconoclastic satirist Henry Morgan.
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A member of the production's orchestra, not wanting members of his church to find he was involved with such a risqué play, had his name credited as George Spelvin. The one-act play The Actor's Nightmare by Christopher Durang features a main character named George Spelvin, and the January 27, 1942, episode of Fibber McGee and Molly ("The Blizzard") features a visit by a stranger calling himself George Spelvin (played by Frank Nelson). The columnist Westbrook Pegler used this name in his writings; one of his books of collected columns is titled George Spelvin, American. The name was used in the I Love Lucy episode "Don Juan is Shelved", in the Mama's Family episode "Fangs A Lot, Mama" as the author of a book called A Nun's Life, and as the name of a character villain voiced by Peter Serafinowicz in the "Tragical History" episode of Archer.
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Two years after the events in Tortoise Beats Hare, Bugs is watching footage of that cartoon, determined to learn how it was that Cecil managed to beat him (the cartoon seems to depict Cecil as having won fairly, rather than the truth, which was that the turtle engaged his cousins to cheat and help him win). Bugs then goes to Cecil's house disguised as an old man (a parody of Bill Thompson's "Old Timer" character from Fibber McGee and Molly) to ask about the turtle's secret for winning. Cecil is not the least bit fooled by the disguise, but goes along with the gag, claiming that his streamlined shell ensures his success; he produces a set of blueprints for his "air-flow chassis." He also adds that, in contrast, the long ears of a rabbit only serve as "wind resistance", which slows the rabbit down.
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Another notable early episode was Fletcher's "The Hitch Hiker", in which a motorist (Orson Welles) is stalked on a cross-country trip by a nondescript man who keeps appearing on the side of the road. This episode originally aired on September 2, 1942, and was later adapted for television by Rod Serling as a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone. The episode's primary plot device of a motorist being relentlessly pursued by a diabolical hitchhiker was also featured in the 1986 horror classic The Hitcher, with 18-year-old C. Thomas Howell assuming Welles's role as the young protagonist. After the network sustained the program during its first two years, the sponsor became Roma Wines (1944–1947), and then (after another brief period of sustained hour-long episodes, initially featuring Robert Montgomery as host and "producer" in early 1948), Autolite Spark Plugs (1948–1954); eventually Harlow Wilcox (of Fibber McGee and Molly) became the pitchman.
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Intended as a one- time appearance, the pair became a recurring role starting in the 1945–46 season, and in early 1947, Benaderet and Berner momentarily took over the actual NBC switchboards in Hollywood for publicity photos. She performed in as many as five shows daily, causing her rehearsal dates to conflict with those of The Jack Benny Program and resulting in her reading live as Gertrude from a marked script she was handed upon entering the studio. Other recurring characters Benaderet portrayed were Blanche Morton on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show; school principal Eve Goodwin on The Great Gildersleeve; Millicent Carstairs on Fibber McGee & Molly; Gloria the maid on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet; and Iris Atterbury on the Lucille Ball vehicle My Favorite Husband, opposite Gale Gordon. Benaderet voiced various one-time parts before joining the main cast as Iris, the neighbor and friend of Ball's character Liz Cooper.
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