Jeff Kallman's excellent The Easy Ace: A Journal of Classic Radio
is a wonderful place to spend hours on end, rediscovering the Golden Age of Radio
as it's meant to be discovered and celebrated. Article after article
is filled with a wonderful new vignette about Golden Age Radio History.
---The Digital Deli Online.

[I]n his matchless on-this-day approach to chronicling “yesteryear,”
he easily aces out a less organized mind like mine,
which promptly lapsed into a more idiosyncratic mode of relating the past.
---broadcastellan.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Death From The Deep: The Way It Was, 12 June

1938---One of the best-known and loved old-time radio dramatic episodes hit the air exactly seventy years ago this evening.

Lamont Cranston (Orson Welles) fears a brilliant but disgraced Navy designer just may be the designer of a weapon responsible for a series of heretofore-unsolved and deadly shipping disasters . . . and he just may be remorseful enough---and, frightened enough of the man who hired and then betrayed him---to help the master mentalist blow up the plan before it blows anything else up on the high or low seas, on tonight's edition of The Shadow. (Mutual.)

Margot Lane: Agnes Moorehead. Additional cast: Unknown. Writer: Unknown.

AIRWAVES . . .

1851: THE AETHER ZONE---Oliver Joseph Lodge---the British physicist who will address light-bearing aether as the wave-bearing medium filling all space and toward the radio transmission he produces between those of Tesla and Marconi, improving Branly's coherer radio wave detector with a kind of trembler dislodging clumped filings and restoring its sensitivity (Wikipedia)---is born in Stoke-on-Trent.

1936: FIFTY GRAND---The first known fifty thousand watt radio station begins its experiments in Pittsburgh.

CHANNEL SURFING . . .

1939: THE WHITE BANNERS---Tasteful adaptation of the 1938 film about a homeless woman (Fay Bainter, reprising her film role) taken in by a kindly family who doesn't know their teenage neighbour (Jackie Cooper, also reprising his film role) is the son she surrendered for adoption after his out-of-wedlock birth, on tonight's edition of Lux Radio Theater. (CBS.)

Additional cast: Lewis Stone, Jean Hainey, Elizabeth Wilbur, Richard LeGrand, Lou Merrill, Ross Forrester, Mary Lansing, Conway P. Coe. Host: Cecil B. DeMille. Writers: Lenore Coffee, Abem Finkel, Cameron Rogers, based on the book by Lloyd C. Douglas.

1949: THE DEAD MAN WALKS---A woman writes the box fearing her father is in some sort of trouble, but Holliday (Alan Ladd) learns he's dead . . . and then alive, only too suspiciously, on tonight's edition of Box 13. (Mutual.)

Sheila: Lurene Tuttle. Suzy: Sylvia Packer. Kling: Edmund McDonald. Additional cast: Alan Reed, Luis van Rooten, Betty Lou Gerson, Frank Lovejoy. Writer: Russell Hughes.

1954: THE COVER-UP---It begins with Barnaby Hoffer wanting to shoot Art Long, usually a man of peace, on sight, which puzzles Matt (William Conrad) before he's cut in a brief scuffle with the man, on tonight's edition of Gunsmoke. (CBS.)

Chester: Parley Baer. Kitty: Georgia Ellis. Doc: Howard McNear. Additional cast: Joseph Kearns, Helen Klee, Paul Savage, Clayton Fuller. Writer: John Meston.

PREMIERING TODAY . . .

1884---William Austin (actor: Jack Oakie's College), Georgetown, British Guiana.
1890---Junius Matthews (actor: David Harum; Gasoline Alley), Chicago.
1893---Evelyn Varden (actress: Easy Aces; This Is Nora Drake; Young Dr. Malone; mr. ace and JANE), Adair, Oklahoma.
1909---Archie Bleyer (bandleader: Arthur Godfrey Time; Arthur Godfrey and His Friends; Casey, Crime Photographer), Corona, New York.
1914---Herbert C. Kenny (singer, with the Ink Spots: The Four Ink Spots; Let's Go Nightclubbing), unknown.
1915---Priscilla Lane (singer: The Fred Waring Show), Indianola, Iowa.
1919---Uta Hagen (actress: The Big Show), Gottingen, Germany.
1924---Dave Parker (actor: The Lone Ranger; The Green Hornet; Challenge of the Yukon), Fresno, California.
1928---Vic Damone (as Vito Rocco Farinola; singer: Saturday Night Serenade; Stars in Khaki 'n' Blue), Brooklyn.

2 Comments:

Blogger Buzz Stephens said...

Speaking of Agnes Moorehead, you can hear her legendary radio peformance in Sorry, Wrong Number, over at The Judy Garland Experience this week.
Here is the link:
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/thejudygarlandexperience/

7:30 AM  
Blogger Jeff Kallman said...

Buzz---You can have it in your own collection, too. Start here, with the link I provided when I reviewed the show on its 25 May anniversary. The same link should offer you every edition of Suspense in which she appeared; if that one doesn't, archive.org will. Happy hunting!---Jeff

12:11 PM  

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