Golden Age of Radio

Laura Leslie -born nineteen years ago in Finks-burgh. Mary land, pop. 300, she grew up singing; had a weekly sponsored spot on WBAL while attending high school in Baltimore and got another sponsor on WFBR for a graduation present. She went to Los Angeles for some club bookings; tired of West Coast night life; came home and auditioned for Sammy Kaye when he was appearing at a Baltimore theater. So he signed her.

SAY HELLO TO. . . VINCENT LOPEZ—leader of the orchestra on the Show of the Week, on MBS this evening. Vince has been supplying smart society with dance music since 1919. He has never worked in any other band and has always led his own. Definitely opposed to swing music, he stuck to the sweet variety through thick and thin. He himself is a sophisticated as his music, has made and lost several fortunes. VINCENT LOPEZ . . . was born in Brooklyn, N. Y. His father was a bandmaster in the U. S. Navy and his mother a musician, but the parents wanted Vincent to become a priest. He consented to attend a seminary at Dunkirk, N. Y. The director of the school realized that the boy’s future was not to be that of priest, explained matters at home and once again Vincent was free. Then he was sent to business school. Later worked in a dairy office. Finally he organized his own band. You know the rest. 

The Milwaukee Journal – Oct 20, 1940 The Gooks—Vic, Sade and Rush NINE years ago last June, Paul Rhymer was dozing comfortably in NBC continuity office in Chicago. Everyone had gone and, in the quiet of the Saturday afternoon, he was enjoying his spring fever in an orgy of laziness. Into this placid scene strode C. L Menser, looking for a continuity writer to dish up a script for three actors he wanted to audition the unluckiest guy in the world, simply because he hadn’t gone home, but he pounded out a script and turned it in. The three actors never were hired, but Rhymer’s script was it was “ Vic and Sade ”-now the most popular serial story on the air. Just recently, the women’s national radio committee announced its last survey showed that the whimsical story of the “Gook family, halfway up in the next block,” appeals to women in every block and every farm because it’s “complete in each broadcast” and because it’s “about people like ourselves.” “ Vic and Sade...

CHARLES LYON . . .  was born in Detroit in 1905. He’s from NBC, played in movies, was an ordinary seaman on an ocean freighter, juggled dishes at night for a N. Y. café. ‘Tis said he lost 9 pounds announcing the first days of the Democratic Convention last summer. Won fame when he flew to Edmonton, Canada, to announce the arrival of Mattern, who didn’t arrive, and Post, who did.

Marilyn Maxwell __the willowy blonde singer who is teamed with Abbott and Costello on their Thursday night program over NBC. She was once a singer with Ted Weems and wrote songs with him before she was spotted by Hollywood while singing at a bond rally in Cleveland. Her first camera work was with Robert Taylor in “Stand By For Action”—and her first name is “Marvel”!

GRAHAM McNAMEE . . . w a s serving on a jury in New York in May, 1922, when, during an idle lunch hour, he wandered up to WEAF to see what a broadcasting station looked like. Now he’s a fixture at NBC of which WEAF is one of the key stations. A promising baritone before 1922, he’s sung and talked and acted in all kinds of shows at all hours since the days of the Crystal sets. He was born in Washington, D. C., in 1889.

ENGLISH IS A DIALECT Jack Lloyd is one of the busiest actors on the air. The shows he appears in are so numerous it would take too much space to list them except to mention that they’re of the caliber of We the People , Front Page Farrell . The Kate Smith Hour , and Valiant Lady . The parts he plays on these shows are strictly American style juveniles and romantic leads. Yet, in the most realistic sense of the word, playing an American juvenile is, for Jack, playing a dialect part. And he had a good bit of trouble learning this dialect. When Jack Lloyd arrived in the United States from Holland in 1939, he knew exactly two words of English. One of them was “yes” and the other “no,” by no means an extensive vocabulary for an actor. And an actor was what Jack intended to be, since it was the thing for which he was trained. He had already acquired quite a reputation for himself on the stage and in the movies in Holland. Learning English was a slow process, at first. But the...