Golden Age of Radio

Radio rights to Dorothy Dix have been acquired by Frank Cooper Associates, who have already done three experimental audition records. Miss Dix, who started advising the lovelorn in 1896, is correctly syndicated in 216 newspapers . . . Lester Gottliab, Young & Rublcam talent and programing exec, left New York Friday (16) for the Coast to help launch the agency’s top shows this fall, including Fannie Brice, Duffy’s Tavern, Joan Davis , Ginny Simms, Allan Young, etc . . . Dick Powell-Texace Show, Rogue’s Gallery, is about set with conirects to be okayed Monday or Tuesday { 18 or 20} . . . WNAZ, Sarange Lake, N, Y . . . affiliate of ABC, granted a construction permit by the FCC to operate with 230 watis time on 1450 AC. Now a 100 walter, station will make the switch about October 1.

The Milwaukee Journal –Feb 7, 1943 Who is Dis Guy Archie, Anyway? Ed Gardner of ‘ Duffy ’s’ Went From WPA to Radio Heights; You’d Enjoy Meeting Him By Paul McMahon Of The Journal’s N. Y. Bureau ED GARDNER is Archie. And Archie is Gardner. They have been one and the same since Gardner played piano at the age of 14 in a saloon in his home town of Astoria, N. Y. It wasn’t until late years that Gardner got around to creating the Archie role for the entertainment of radio fans who now hear the naive, wise guy counterman in “ Duffy ’s” over the Blue network at 7:30 Tuesday nights. “ Dere’s always been somethin ’ of Archie in me,” Gardner confessed one day. “ Ya know de old sayin ’, ‘As de twing is bent.’” The character of Archie first came to life in 1939 in a program entitled “This Is New York,” to which Gardner had been assigned as director and producer. Gardner went through misery trying to find someone to fit his conception of Archie. In despair one...

Sunday, December 27, 1942       THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL—SCREEN and RADIO Building a Bob Hope Radio Show Comedy half hour is put together piece by piece, rough edges trimmed By Kate Holliday “THAT was a boff . Leave it in!” Such a cry might barrel through the NBC control room in Hollywood at a preview of Bob Hope’s radio show . A boff, for your information, is a joke so funny it brings a belly laugh. What is a radio show preview? Just that: A show before a show—to which the public is invited and at which Hope and company test the merit of gags they have concocted. It explains, to a large degree, Hope’s continued success. A comedian’s life is usually not a happy one, evidence to the contrary. A guy like Hope, say, doesn’t just amble toward a microphone come Tuesday night and be funny. Instead, he builds his show gag by gag . It all begins on the Thursday or Friday of the week preceding the program. At that point Hope and his seven wri...

The Miami News – Feb 4, 1947 On The Wing With GRACE WING ARCHIE: It was a far cry from Duffy’s Tavern to the palatial yachts over which I climbed to find Ed (Archie) Gardner yesterday afternoon. But Archie himself turned out to be the dyed-in-the-wool image of just what you hear on the radio. Reason is that Gardner doesn’t tailor his personality to fit the role of Archie the Malaprop. The part was written for him in the first place. His good-natured, slightly bewildered drawl sounds just the same whether he’s stewing over a telephone call from Duffy or regaling luncheon guests with spicy stories as he was doing yesterday. “How’d you get to be Archie?” I asked him. He told me he used to be a radio producer and writer, and that he dreamed up a serial about New York as seen through the eyes of a rich man and a bum. “Respective eyes, I mean—there were two characters,” he chuckled. “We auditioned a lot of guys for the part of the rich man and I always read the ...

Alan Reed ALAN REED, who plays the role of Pasquale on Life With Luigi (CBS, Sundays, at 10 P.M., EDT), has done spots on virtually every radio program in New York and Hollywood, including a dozen or more daytime serials. His best known roles have been Falstaff Openshaw, poet, on the Fred Allen Show , Clancy the cop on Duffy’s Tavern and Mr. Weamish on the Baby Snooks Show. Today his voice is heard in twenty-twwo dialects on almost all of major shows. Alan Reed was born in New York and started his preparations for the theater during grammar school days when, as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.”  he caught his beard in the stage door. Quick thinking made him play it that way ever since. After extracting as much humor as he could from prep school. Reed moved his 210 pounds to Columbia University, where he became the intercollegiate broad-jumping champion wrestler and writer of college plays, just to prove that a brawny arm could swing a delicate pen Reed consi...

The Milwaukee Journal – Jan 28, 1945 Unveiling  DUFFY’S TAVERN “ DUFFY’S TAVERN , where the elite meet to eat, Archie the manager speaking . . .” That’s Ed Gardner, Archie himself, who has got himself and his tavern into the movies after winning nation-wide laughter as a radio comedian (7:30 p. m. Fridays, WTMJ) Gardner is a former WPA worker who mangled English so intelligently that the radio industry figured he really was worth $5,000 a week. Hollywood raised the ante so the tavern, with its characters and free lunch, is now before the cameras at Paramount. Everybody from the radio show is there except Duffy himself, the disembodied voice who calls Archie on the phone. And it includes Clifton Finnegan, the well known moron; Eddie, the waiter, and the enchanting Miss Duffy herself. To give the hangout a little style, Paramount has chipped in with Bing Crosby and the four Crosby kids, Dorothy Lamour , Veronica Lake, Eddie Bracken , Victor Moore, Barry...

Boogeymen in Comedy (Screamstars playing for laughs) Mention these names: Vincent Price , Bela Lugosi , Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff . And you would have a congregation of horror-inflicting characters who would surely induce fear and discomfort in this collection. It must be noted that all these actors assumed roles which inspired horror and terrors to their audience. However, in real life, they were nothing like the scary characters they portrayed in the movies, that’s for sure. Actually, they were all nice and often cast a funny demeanor. Their roles in the movies would surely give us scary pictures of them, and they were abominable people you would not want to meet. But the scary characters they played in films have always been spoofed which never failed to delight the audience. Boris Karloff was an English actor who did a great job in each of his horror films. His first acting role on a horror film that made him a star came with Frankenstein in 1931 as Frankenstein...