Old Radio

Back on March 8, 1910, the beautiful "Queen of Film Noir" Claire Trevor was born. Playing roles as a husky-voiced blonde and seemed to fill the role of gun-moll, seductress or tough minded career woman with aplomb.

March 1, 1932: Start of the greatest effort of on-the-spot news coverage of radio involving the kidnapping of Charles and Anne Lindbergh's baby. CBS and NBC rushed to Hopewell, NJJ to cover the incident. On March 1, 1932,around 8:00 and 10:00 o'clock, son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, was kidnapped from his nursery room. The kidnappers left a small note asked for ransom for the child. By the next morning, news about the kidnapping had been broadcast to the world and reporters, cameramen, curious onlookers, and souvenir hunters swarmed over the Lindbergh estate. Unfortunately, the present of news hunter made some of evidence that has not yet retrieved by police was lost in the stampede. Charles Lindbergh wanted the police to allow him to negotiate without interference with the kidnappers and he told that to Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, head of the New Jersey State Police. Lindbergh used NBC to radio broadcast his message to the kidnapper or kidnappers. He promis

On this day in 1928, Louise Erickson was born.

Gale Gordon - the undisputed master of the slow burn - was born on this day in 1906. 

February 15: Happy Birthday, John Barrymore Drew Barrymore's grandfather, yes, but  John Barrymore  was also a theatre actor lauded for his performance as the title character in Hamlet on Broadway (1922) and for his roles in the films Don Juan, Dinner at Eight, Twentieth Century and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . His radio life included many appearances on The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour ( The Rudy Vallee Show ), most of them in 1941. His last performance was on the May 5, 1942 episode of the show. It was at a rehearsal for Vallee's show later in the year that he collapsed and went into a coma. A brief life of hard-drinking ended for Barrymore on May 29, 1942. Depending on who one believes, his dying words were either "Die?...No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him," or "you heard me, Mike." The oldtime radio world salutes  John Barrymore  on the day of his birth in 1882.

On this day in 1894, Jack Benny was born.

February 12: Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln What is Honest Abe, the man on the penny, doing on a site devoted to classic radio? Here's the secret. Here's the answer to the mystery. Not only is Abraham Lincoln still regularly written about, re-imagined, investigated, and portrayed (see the new film, Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg), but he was particularly popular as a subject for radio plays. For one ready example, the popular show Cavalcade of America gave us a cavalcade of no less than eight original documentaries on Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln , Abraham Lincoln : The War Years, Ann Rutledge and Lincoln, Mr. Lincoln's Wife and others. In 1953, Crime Classics devoted its attentions to the assassination of our fourteenth president. The revered You Are There looked at the same topic in July, 1947, and covered the Battle of Gettysburg in 1948 and the capture of John Wilkes Booth in 1949. Maybe you were there for these original broadcasts. At any rate, i