Golden Age of Radio

The Milwaukee Journal – Dec 13, 1942   Browse this newspaper>>           Browse all newspapers >> Now Here Is Story of a Famous Team BEFORE this winter is past, “ Amos ‘ n’Andy ,” the well loved Harlem pair, will have been rolling along for 15 years. Theirs is one of the longest team associations in radio, and its beginnings go back to the earliest days. Listeners and their following, if not as large as it used to be, is still one of the most devoted have come to think of Amos ‘n’ Andy in black face, much as Charlie McCarthy ’s fans think of the splinter as being flesh and blood. Who are the real Amos ‘n’ Andy ? One boy (Andy) hails from Peoria, Ill. His name is Charles Correll and he was a newsboy, clerk, bricklayer and technician in an arsenal before he found his real love-show business. Starting as a piano player in a picture house, he went on to producing amateur shows. The other boy, Freeman Gosden (Amos), came from Richmond, Va . He’d trie

The Milwaukee Journal – Jul 1, 1941 Amos ‘n’ Andy Still Struggle for Script Ideas TWO gentlemen from the west were entertaining H. Allen Smith of the New York World Telegram in an elegant suite of the elegant Savoy Plaza. One of the two, wearing a tan bathrobe over his shorts, was on a chair next to a window and was squinting into a kaleidoscope—not one of your little cigar size Kaleidoscopes, but a kaleidoscope as big as a virgin bologna. As he turned the thing slowly in his hand he kept saying: “Lawd, lawd! Is that purty! Purtiest thing I ever saw in my life.” The other gentleman from the west—a handsome fellow in expensive togs- sat on the edge of his chair and occasionally reached out hesitantly for the kaleidoscope. “C’mon, now,” he said. “Lemmy look a while. It’s my turn gold urn it, and you had it long enough.” The names of these two are Amos ‘n’Andy . On the desk stood a portable typewriter and in it a script sandwich composed of two sheets of onion

“If we had it to do OVER AGAIN” A Great Radio Pair Look Back Over Their Career on Their Fourteenth Anniversary By Amos ‘n’ Andy WHEN the nation turned the hands of its timepieces to adjust them to the new war time , we started wondering what we would do if some magic power could enable us to turn back over the years of Amos ‘n’ Andy ’s existence. We wondered if, perhaps, we would be guided differently. We talked about what might have been done with the characters Madam Queen, Brother Crawford, the Kingfish and all the others. Would we have made them mean what they do today? Would we have changed any of the patterns we have followed steadily all these years? Of course, in the first place we don’t want to turn back the clock. Even though we realize there were things we could have improved, we’re content to carry on from here. But it’s always interesting to go back over the past and perhaps remodel it in imagination. It’s interesting to us to do so, because we have