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Updated 10/02/2020
 ​                 THE ALL TIME TOP 100 

One of the original goals of GOld Time Radio's predecessor in print, Network Radio Ratings, 1932-1953, was to identify the Top 100 programs and personalities of Network Radio's Golden Age when the four chains of stations linked by AT&T wires - NBC, CBS, Blue/ABC and Mutual - dominated the medium.  Now, a decade later, we have succeeded, at least to our own satisfaction.  Here is how we arrived at the list: 

The Ground Rules of The Air Waves.  Network Radio's Golden Age were the 21 broadcast seasons between September, 1932, and June, 1953, based on network revenues and audience ratings.  (This site's posts, The Network Race and Three Eras of The Golden Age, expand on those seasons.)

Note:  All topics, programs and personalities identified in Blue font are linked to detailed posts on the same subject.  

Broadcast seasons are defined as the ten months from September through June. (July and August ratings are not included because most of Network Radio’s major attractions left the air during the hot summer months when listeners deserted their homes for outside activities and air conditioned theaters.)

Once again, these stipulations govern our rating averages and rankings:

               1.  Only sponsored programs appeared in the published ratings. 
               2.  Only those programs broadcast in “prime time”, (6:00 to 11:00 p.m. Eastern),                   were evaluated.
               3.  Only programs rated for at least 13 weeks in any season were ranked.   

The All Time Top 100 Programs and Personalities of Network Radio’s Golden Age identified below are determined by a simple point point system applied against each season’s Top 50 rankings calculated from the ratings that appear in GOld Time Radio at the conclusion of posts under each season's heading, (i.e., The 1932-33 Season, The 1933-34 Season, etc.)  

Fifty points are awarded for first place in a season’s Top 50, down one point for 50th place.   Final positions in our All Time Top 100 are determined by the total number of points scored by each program or personality.   

Often just one or two points separate programs’ positions, particularly in the lower ranks.  But as the list progresses into the upper echelons of the Top 100, the point spreads become greater, leaving little question as to what attractions were the overwhelming favorites of Golden Age listeners.

This system rewards both individual season rating performances and longevity of popularity.  Unfortunately, it also penalizes a number of popular programs that debuted near the end of the Golden Age in 1953.  But the television fame enjoyed by Dragnet, Gunsmoke, My Little Margie, The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet and Father Knows Best far outweighed any loss of recognition caused by their relatively short runs in Network Radio.

So, what elements combined for ratings success at the highest level of commercial broadcasting when the four national networks dominated radio and millions of program sponsors’ advertising dollars were at stake every week?  As outlined in GOld Time Radio's post, Radio's Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & Nielsen, the keys were relatively simple: 

               1.  The program’s content.   
               2. The program’s competition at its day and time of broadcast.                                             3. The program’s long-term consistency in its day, time and source of broadcast.                 4.  The program’s network. 

Network Radio history is loaded with examples of success and failure when these four elements were either observed or ignored by the sponsors and their advertising agencies underwriting the programs or the networks that carried them.  For better or worse, it was seldom the decision of the performers involved.  But the rules governing ratings were the conditions of popularity that brought their talents to the millions of radios in American homes, and often to the country’s movie screens and to early television.

Where's The Green Hornet? Fans of some legendary programs and stars may be disappointed or even indignant to see who didn’t make the All Time Top 100.  Each of the following long running shows entertained millions of devoted listeners - just not enough listeners to rank among the elite 100.   Yet, this doesn’t mean that they were without motion picture connections or television adaptations.  For example:

Easy Aces, (233rd in our final ranking), was a 1934 Warner Brothers short starring Goodman & Jane Ace whose comedic conversations spanned 27 years in Network Radio, but only registered in the Annual Top 50 in their final season, 1948-49. Jane Ace retired after their final season on the air while her husband, who wrote all of Easy Aces’ material, became one of television’s most active and highly paid comedy writers.  

NBC presented a half-hour of The Grand Ole Opry from WSM/Nashville every Saturday night for twelve seasons.  Although it ranks among Saturday's All Time Top Ten, the country music showcase only managed to crack the Top 50 once at 42nd place in 1943-44, and ranks 223rd on the All Time list.  It was also the title of Republic Pictures’ 1940 feature that gave fans of the show a glimpse of their radio “hillbilly” favorites, led by Roy Acuff,  helping the mayor of a small Ozarks town fight city-slicker corruption.  

Richard Diamond, Private Detective, (204th), Dick Powell’s lighthearted, singing gumshoe of radio charmed his way to the Annual Top 50 twice - 49th place in 1950-51 on ABC and 40th place the following season.  The show was translated in name only for a 77 episode run on CBS-TV between 1957 and 1960.  Powell’s highly successful Four Star Productions filmed the series starring David Janssen as the suddenly cynical, hard-boiled private eye - who didn't sing.   

Beginning in 1939, the fast-paced audience participation quiz Dr. I.Q., (200th), toured major movie houses from coast to coast for twelve seasons, presenting its weekly radio broadcasts, but it was never seen in motion pictures.  However, the program had two brief television runs on ABC-TV during the 1953-54 and 1958-59 seasons.  

Lum & Abner, (175th), stars Chet Luack & Norris Goff were popular with radio listeners for 14  seasons beginning in 1933 - just not popular enough.  They only achieved Top 50 ranking twice, 34th in 1936-37 and 48th in 1937-38.  Luack & Goff also appeared in six independently produced, low budget comedies released by RKO between 1940 and 1946: Dreaming Out Loud, The Bashful Bachelor, Two Weeks To Live, So This Is Washington, Goin’ To Town and Partners In Time.  A seventh film, Lum & Abner Abroad, was a compilation of three pilot television episodes that Luack and Goff unsuccessfully attempted to sell as a series in 1956.  

The Lone Ranger, (173rd), first appeared on the screen as a Republic Pictures serial in 1938 with Lee Powell in the title role.  Eleven years later the perennial radio favorite became a 221 episode television series starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels.  The Lone Ranger was the highest rated half-hour of the fledgling ABC-TV from 1949 until 1953 and remained on the network’s schedule until 1957 when it  went into syndication. 
     
Meet Corliss Archer, (162nd), starring Janet Waldo enjoyed three Top 50 seasons in its seven year run starting in 1944 - 44th in 1947-48, 38th in 1950-51 and 45th in 1951-52. The teenage comedy also inspired Columbia Pictures’ Kiss & Tell in 1945, starring 17 year old Shirley Temple.  The comedy was followed four years later by A Kiss For Corliss - aka Almost A Bride - with Temple again in the lead of what became the former child actress‘s final feature film.  

Crime Doctor, (148th), spawned a series of ten low budget films released by Columbia between 1943 and 1949, all starring veteran actor Warner Baxter in the title role.  Although Baxter became the actor most closely identified with the character, he was never heard in the radio series which Philip Morris cigarettes sponsored at 8:30 every Sunday night on CBS for seven seasons beginning in 1940 and twice finishing in the Top 50 - 35th in 1943-44 and 38th in 1944-45 when Everett Sloane played the title role.  

The Adventures of Sam Spade, (145th), took nothing more than its lead characters’ names - private detective Spade and his secretary, Effie Perine - from Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon which became John Huston’s Oscar nominated Warner Brothers film in 1941.  Nevertheless, the radio series that began its five year Network Radio run on ABC in July, 1946, then moved to CBS three months later, credited Hammett in the opening of every program.   

The Goldbergs, (130th), began on radio in 1929 but didn’t become a Paramount movie until 31 years later.  Between those two events, its creator and star, the incredibly prolific Gertrude Berg, wrote and produced the show’s six Network Radio runs, a television series and a Broadway play all based on run her Goldberg family characters.  The longest radio series was a daytime strip that began on NBC in September, 1937, then segued to CBS the following January where it became a weekday feature until 1945.  

When the radio serial was cancelled, Berg used her familiar Goldberg characters as the basis for  the 1948 Broadway stage production, Me & Molly.  While starring in the play she prepared a television adaptation of The Goldbergs that debuted on CBS-TV in January, 1949, and in half-hour radio form on CBS for the 1949-50 season.  

Death Valley Days,  (119th), enjoyed one of the longest continuous runs in Network Radio history.  Although the half-hour western anthology hopped from NBC to Blue, back to NBC, on to CBS and finally ABC, it never missed a week on the air over its 22 seasons. 

Unique in its day, Death Valley Days was created by a woman, Ruth Cornwall Woodman, and boasted an all-female production staff.  The show also had one of radio‘s most loyal sponsors, Pacific Coast Borax, aka U.S. Borax.  The manufacturer of laundry and household cleaners sponsored Death Valley Days - later known as Death Valley Sheriff and The Sheriff - from its beginning in 1931 until six months before its demise in 1951. The company then introduced the program by its original name into a syndicated television run of 558 episodes that were seen in selected markets from 1952 until 1975. 

Borax’s combined radio and television sponsorship of Death Valley Days totaled an unmatched record of 45 years.  Despite these distinctions, Death Valley Days is best remembered today for its television host of only one season, Ronald Reagan.  It was the future President’s final Hollywood role before he ran successfully for Governor of California in 1966. 
 
The Adventures of The Thin Man, (105th), was one of the most mishandled programs of Network Radio’s Golden Age.  It would have ranked much higher if its string of four sponsors hadn’t shuffled the program among seven separate timeslots on three different networks during its eight seasons on the air.  Like The Adventures of Sam Spade, The Adventures of The Thin Man was based on movie characters taken from a  Dashiell Hammett novel.  The Thin Man was adapted into a popular MGM film in 1934 starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as married sleuths Nick & Nora Charles. The witty and  sexy couple swigged martinis and solved mysteries through five sequels.   Radio’s Adventures of The Thin Man  finished in the Annual Top 50 four times until it left the air in 1950.   

The Shadow, (Unranked), enjoyed only one season in the Annual Top 50, 1932-33 on NBC.  This was before the program was reformatted as the familiar Sunday afternoon adventures of Lamont Cranston and, "...his constant companion, the lovely Margo Lane", broadcast by Mutual from 1937 through 1954.  Had this series been heard in the evening hours and thus qualified for these rankings,  its ratings would have earned three more Top 50 finishes - 1941-42, (47th), 1942-43, (22nd), and 1943-44, (32nd) - placing it 68th in our All Time Top 100. 

The Shadow was first adapted to movies in the 1940 Columbia serial starring veteran actor Victor Jory as Cranston. The potential problem of visually presenting the character’s ability to “…cloud men’s minds so they could not see him…”  was solved by simply ignoring it.  

Now, about The Green Hornet.  The popular half-hour from WXYZ/Detroit running for many years as the Tuesday & Thursday alternative to the three-nights-a-week Lone Ranger, never made a season's Top 50 in its 1936 to 1952 run on Mutual, Blue and ABC.
Gordon Jones and Keye Luke starred in the first screen adaptation of The Green Hornet, a 13 chapter serial, released by Universal in January, 1940.  It was followed by a second serial from Universal, The Green Hornet Strikes Again, with Warren Hull and Keye Luke, eleven months later.

These examples of crossovers indicate that a radio program or its stars’ popularity was often proportionate to its motion picture and/or television exposure.  The ratio becomes even more evident as we proceed through the All Time Top 100 based on the 21 Annual Top 50 lists between 1932 and 1953.  Achieving that ranking was no easy task.  

Sneak peeks at Network Radio's peaks... Two hundred and sixty-two separate programs and personalities made the Annual Top 50 at least once over the 21 years of Network Radio’s Golden Age.  That’s less than ten percent of the 2,850 prime time entries rated and ranked during the period, but more than enough to determine our All Time Top 100. 

Only two individuals made the Annual Top 50 in all 21 seasons from 1932 through 1953 - Jack Benny and Walter Winchell.  Bing Crosby achieved the list 20 times.  Amos & Andy scored 19 Top 50 finishes.  Burns & Allen, Lux Radio Theater and Your Hit Parade each registered 18 Top 50 seasons. Just 31 entries achieved ten or more Top 50 seasons.   

Placing first in any given month was even a more difficult challenge.  During the 210 months of the Golden Age, a mere 16 programs were the top rated of any given month.  Comedians Ed Wynn and Jack Pearl were the only monthly winners who dropped from listener popularity so quickly that they failed to make the All Time Top 50.  (See The Monthlies.)

​So, how did these attractions of Network Radio‘s Golden Age finish in GOld Time Radio's All Time Top 100?  Be ready for more than a few surprises:


100     THE ENO CRIME CLUB    Years Broadcast 1931-1936         66 Points
Seasons Ranked: 4   Top 100 Seasons: 4   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top 10 Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 27th, 1932-33           Highest Season Rating: 15.4, 1933-34.    ​
Highest Monthly Rating: 18.6, Feb 1934      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Hosts: Edward Reese, 1932-34; Clyde North, 1934-36.

Where's Eno?  One of Network Radio’s first whodunits, Eno Crime Club of the 1930’s was far more popular than its namesake, The Crime Club, an eight month sustaining series on Mutual in 1946-47.  But both paled in comparison to the series of detective mystery novels upon which they were based. Doubleday established the Crime Club imprint in 1928 and published almost 2,500 titles over the next 63 years including all 50 of Leslie Charteris’ adventures of The Saint and Sax Rohmer‘s Fu Manchu series, both of which experienced only mediocre Network Radio runs.  

The Eno radio series began on CBS in 1931 in a string of different formats, days and times.  It moved to Blue in January, 1933, presenting each week’s mystery on Tuesday night and its solution on Wednesday.  Its name was changed to Eno Crime Clues in April, 1934, and its format was contracted to a single Tuesday night half-hour episode in January. 

Although the program had little competition in its Tuesday timeslot, it lost 40% of its audience in 1935-36 and was cancelled at the end of the season, retired as the 16th most popular mystery series of the Golden Age.   

It‘s sponsor, Eno Salts, remains a curiosity to many today.  The antacid was invented in the mid-19th century by British pharmacist, James Eno. Similar to bicarbonate of soda - Eno was billed alternately as “therapeutic”, “effervescent” and “fruit salts” in hard sell radio and print ads.  Eno Salts are still manufactured today by GlaxoSmithKline and remains readily available in most countries outside the United States where it’s used both as an antacid and in cooking as a substitute for baking soda. 

99     THE AMERICAN ALBUM OF FAMILIAR MUSIC             
​                                                                           Years Broadcast: 1933-1951    67 Points 
Seasons Ranked: 19  Top 100 Seasons: 19  Top 50 Seasons: 10  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 34th, 1933-34.            Highest Season Rating: 14.8, 1933-34.   
Highest Monthly Rating: 17.8, Apr 1934.       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Leads: Frank Munn & Gus Haenschen Orch, (1932-45); Frank Parker & Gus Haenschen Orch,(1945-47); Abe Lyman Orch & Soloists, (1947-51).

Play A Simple Melody. Frank & Anne Hummert's weekly showcase of standard music was the home of Frank Munn's "Golden Voice of Radio" from 1933 to 1945 and among Sunday's Top Ten shows for ten of its 19 seasons.

​98       JACK PEARL                          Years Broadcast: 1932-1939       72 Points
Seasons Ranked: 5   Top 100 Seasons: 5   Top 50 Seasons: 3   Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 3rd, 1932-33.            Highest Season Rating: 39.4, 1932-33
Highest Monthly Rating: 53.8, Feb 1934      Months Rated Number One: 1,  May 1933.

Let's Go Dutch.  Jack Pearl is the lowest ranking personality to have ever had a month's top rated program. He arrived on NBC's Lucky Strike Hour in 1932 as his German, (later Dutch), character Baron Munchausen with his straight man, Cliff Hall.  As the teller of tall tales who responded with, "Vas you dere, Sharlie?", when challenged, Pearl created one of Network Radio's first popular catch-phrases.  Pearl's career faded along with his phrase and he left series radio in 1937 - returning for summer fill-in work in 1948 and 1951. His limited film career includes two appearances as his Baron Munchausen character: MGM's Meet The Baron in 1933 followed by Hollywood Party from the same studio in 1934.

97      THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES          
                                                                           Years Broadcast: 1932-1950    73 Points
Seasons Ranked: 12   Top 100 Seasons: 8   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top 10 Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 15th, 1932-33              Highest Season Rating: 21.0, 1932-33.   
Highest Monthly Rating: 25.5, Jan 1933         Months Rated Number One: 0.
​Lead Actors: Richard Gordon, (1932-33); Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce, (1939-42).

Elementary, My Dear Listener. Today's classic movie audiences best remember the Basil Rathbone & Nigel Bruce series of 15 Holmes films which began in 1939 and continued until 1946.  The two actors’ highly distinctive voices were ideal for radio drama.  They began their seven years as Holmes and Watson on October 2, 1939.  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ first season on Blue with Rathbone and Bruce finished among Monday’s Top Ten and 1939-40’s Top 50 programs.  

96      THE HALLMARK PLAYHOUSE  
                                                      Years Broadcast: 1948-1955       74 Points
Seasons Ranked: 5   Top 100 Seasons: 5   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top 10 Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 29th, 1950-51            Highest Season Rating: 12.0, 1948-49.   
Highest Monthly Rating: 16.4, Dec 1948       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Hosts: James Hilton, (1948-1953), Lionel Barrymore, (1953-1955).

When You Care Enough, etc... The CBS weekly dramatic anthology of classic fiction, named for its greeting card sponsor, changed its name in the final two seasons to The Hallmark Hall of Fame. 

​94t      FATHER KNOWS BEST    Years Broadcast: 1949-1953        76 Points
Seasons Ranked: 4   Top 100 Seasons: 4   Top 50 Seasons: 3   Top 10 Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 18th, 1951-52           Highest Season Rating: 9.5, 1950-51.   
Highest Monthly Rating: 13.0, Mar 1950      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors:  Robert Young.

"Honey, I'm Home!" The radio series preceded the popular television sitcom that ran for 203 episodes over six seasons beginning in 1954.  Nevertheless, the radio version of the sitcom scored enough points to become one of Thursday's All Time Top Ten shows.

​94t      INFORMATION PLEASE       Years Broadcast: 1938-1948    76 Points
Seasons Ranked: 10   Top 100 Seasons: 8    Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top 10 Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 27th, 1939-40               Highest Season Rating: 13.1, 1939-40.   
Highest Monthly Rating: 15.9, Oct 1940          Months Rated Number One: 0.
Host: Clifton Fadiman.  Panel: Franklin P. Adams, John Kiernan, Oscar Levant & Guests.

Pleas For Information.  The panel show answering questions submitted by listeners featured one of the most unusual openings in Network Radio:  A shrill rooster's crow followed by an announcer's order to, "Wake up America, it's time to stump the experts!"  

93      DRAGNET                                               Years Broadcast: 1949-1957       79 Points
Seasons Ranked: 4   Top 100 Seasons: 4   Top 50 Seasons: 3   Top 10 Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 14th, 1950-51     Highest Season Rating: 8.7, 1950-51, 1951-52
Highest Monthly Rating: 11.5, Jan 1950      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors:  Jack Webb,  Barton Yarborough, Ben Alexander.

​"Just The Facts, Ma'am"... Webb's Mark VII Productions created Dragnet's television adaptation which debuted on NBC-TV in 1951 and ran until 1959.  Webb resumed production of Dragnet in 1967 and the detective series ran for an encore three and a half seasons. 

92      THE FAT MAN                                   Years Broadcast: 1946-1952       83 Points
Seasons Ranked: 5   Top 100 Seasons: 5   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top 10 Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 17th, 1950-51           Highest Season Rating: 15.7, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 20.1, Feb 1948      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actor:  J. Scott (Jack) Smart. 
​
Weighty Mysteries. The Fat Man was Friday's most popular program for two seasons, 1949-50 and 1950-51. It was among Friday's All Time Top Ten programs. Veteran character actor Jack Smart, who also fit the radio description of the series' heavy-set detective hero, Brad Runyon, also starred in Universal's film, The Fat Man, which featured sultry singer Julie London and movie newcomer Rock Hudson.  

91      PICK MALONE & PAT PADGETT      
                                                                         Years Broadcast: 1933-1944      84 Points
Seasons Ranked: 8   Top 100 Seasons: 7   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 22nd, 1936-37          Highest Season Rating: 12.2, 1939-40
Highest Monthly Rating:13.8, Jan 1940, Mar 1940   Months Rated Number One: 0.

Monday's Minstrels. Blackface comedians Pick & Pat, (aka Mollasses 'n' January on NBC's Maxwell House Showboat),  gave CBS the top rated half hour on Mondays from 8:30 to 9:00 over four seasons from 1936 to 1940 with their Model Minstrels show sponsored by U.S. Tobacco's Model Pipe Tobacco.  Their show ranks among Monday's All Time Top Ten.

89t      CASEY, CRIME PHOTOGRAPHER                                    
                                                                        Years Broadcast: 1946-1951        85 Points
Seasons Ranked: 4   Top 100 Seasons: 4   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 16th, 1948-49.          Highest Season Rating: 15.7, 1948-49
Highest Monthly Rating:18.8, Jan 1948       Months Rated Number One: 0
​Lead Actor:  Staats Cotsworth.
​
Good Stories, Great Music... The series, inspired by George Harmon Coxe novels, was also known over its run as Flashbulb Casey and Casey, Press Photographer.  It stood out among all radio shows by its jazz piano background music, provided in Casey's hangout, The Blue Note, by Herman Chittison and Teddy Wilson.

89t      CAN YOU TOP THIS?        Years Broadcast: 1942-1951        85 Points
Seasons Ranked: 7   Top 100 Seasons: 7   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 26th, 1945-46.          Highest Season Rating: 13.9, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 16.7  Jan 1946      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Host: Ward Wilson. 
Panel: Peter Donald, "Senator" Ed Ford, Harry Hirshfield, Joe Laurie, Jr.

The Joke's On Us!  Can You Top This? was a rarity by scoring its highest monthly rating during a season when it didn’t reach the annual Top 50.  Nevertheless, the weekly panel of veteran jokesters became one of Saturday's All Time Top Ten.

87t       FRANK CRUMIT & JULIA SANDERSON                      
                                                                        Years Broadcast: 1932-1943        86 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6   Top 100 Seasons: 6   Top 50 Seasons: 6   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 27th, 1939-40.          Highest Season Rating: 15.1, 1932-33
Highest Monthly Rating:19.3, Feb 1933       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Featured Shows:  The Blackstone Plantation, The Battle of The Sexes, The Crumit & Sanderson Quiz.

The Lady & The Scamp.  Comedian and songwriter Frank Crumit, (I'm Sitting On Top of The World, Stumbling, Ukulele Lady, Mountain Greenery, The Song of The Prune, The Pig Got Up & Slowly Walked Away, etc.) and Broadway musical star Julia Sanderson were the fourth highest ranked married couple in the Top 100 behind Jim & Marian Jordan, George Burns & Gracie Allen and Phil Harris & Alice Faye.
​
87t      MR. CHAMELEON                Years Broadcast: 1948-1953        86 Points
Seasons Ranked: 4   Top 100 Seasons: 4   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 10th, 1950-51.          Highest Season Rating: 13.4, 1948-49
Highest Monthly Rating: 17.4, Feb 1950      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actor:  Karl Swenson

It's Really Me, You Know.  Mr. Chameleon was the only prime time program from the Frank & Anne Hummert stable to ever reach an Annual Top Ten.  To give listeners the sense that he had disguised his appearance, to trap a criminal, Mr. Chameleon star Karl Swenson changed his voice and altered his delivery.  Gee...who would ever know?

86      WILL ROGERS                        Years Broadcast: 1930-1935        89 Points
Seasons Ranked: 2   Top 100 Seasons: 2   Top 50 Seasons: 2   Top Ten Seasons: 2
Highest Season Rank: 4th, 1933-34.            Highest Season Rating: 37.0, 1933-34
Highest Monthly Rating: 39.9, Feb 1934      Months Rated Number One: 0.

A Star Signs Off.  Will Rogers, 55, humorist/host of the highly rated Gulf Headliners on CBS, was killed at the height of his radio and film career in a plane crash off Point Barrow, Alaska, in August, 1935.

85      MYRT & MARGE                    Years Broadcast: 1931-1939        91 Points
Seasons Ranked: 4   Top 100 Seasons: 4   Top 50 Seasons: 3    Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 12th, 1932-33.          Highest Season Rating: 23.5, 1932-33
Highest Monthly Rating: 25.7  Oct 1932       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors:  Myrtle Vail & Donna Damerel.
​
Another Tragic End. Myrtle Vail and Donna Damerel, who also created the program about two Broadway showgirls, were the only mother and daughter team in Network Radio.  The pair also starred in the 1933 Universal film, Myrt & Marge.  Their partnership came to a tragic end in 1941 with Damerel's death in childbirth at age 28.

84     GENE AUTRY'S MELODY RANCH                                     
                                                                           Years Broadcast: 1940-1956     93 Points
Seasons Ranked: 11   Top 100 Seasons: 10  Top 50 Seasons: 3  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 16th, 1952-53.             Highest Season Rating: 13.1, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 17.2, Dec 1947        Months Rated Number One: 0.

​Back In The Saddle Again... Gene Autry was off the air for three seasons during World War II when he served in the U.S. Army Air Force.  His postwar switch on CBS from Sunday to Saturday nights resulted in a ratings surge that made his Melody Ranch one of Saturday's All Time Top Ten Shows.  Autry's radio success was overshadowed by his fame from movies - 93 musical westerns from 1934 to 1953 - by his popular television show from 1950 to 1956 - and his million selling records headed by Rudolph, The Red Nosed Reindeer in 1949 that has since sold over 25 million copies.   

82t      DENNIS DAY                            Years Broadcast: 1946-1951        98 Points
Seasons Ranked: 5   Top 100 Seasons: 5   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 22nd, 1948-49.         Highest Season Rating: 16.1, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 19.2, Feb 1948      Months Rated Number One: 0.

The Weekend Wonder.  Another of Saturday's All Time Top Ten, Irish tenor and comedian Dennis Day starred in his NBC series while continuing his weekly appearances on Sunday's Jack Benny Program.  Originally a sitcom titled, A Day In The Life of Dennis Day, his half hour changed format in 1951 to variety with guests, The Dennis Day Show.  Dennis Day also starred in a half hour NBC-TV variety series sponsored by RCA from early 1952 to mid-1954.

82t      WAYNE KING                                    Years Broadcast: 1930-1947      98 Points
Seasons Ranked: 9   Top 100 Seasons: 9    Top 50 Seasons: 6   Top  Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 27th, 1936-37             Highest Season Rating: 15.0, 1934-35.   
Highest Monthly Rating: 18.2, Mar 1934       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Hosts: Wayne King, Franklyn MacCormack. 

Three Quarters Time Many Times Over.  The “Waltz King” from Chicago accomplished a singular feat by registering three separate Top 50 programs in one season, 1936-37 with two of his half-hour Lady Esther Serenades on NBC and a third on CBS.  His success was capped during the season with the million selling instrumental novelty, Josephine, which he wrote and recorded for RCA-Victor. 

81      JOE PENNER                                       Years Broadcast: 1933-1940     106 Points
Seasons Ranked: 4   Top 100 Seasons: 4   Top 50 Seasons: 3    Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 6th, 1934-35.             Highest Season Rating: 31.3, 1934-35
Highest Monthly Rating: 38.8, Nov 1934       Months Rated Number One: 0.

Nobody Bought The Duck.  Hungarian born Josef Pinter immigrated to the United States with his parents as a child and made his first stage appearances in Midwest vaudeville and burlesque.  His early radio exposure came on Rudy Vallee's top rated NBC Fleischmann Yeast Hour and made his, "Wanna buy a duck?" and "You naaasty man!" national catch phrases.   

After two highly rated seasons as host of Fleischmann's Bakers' Broadcast on Blue, he quit the show in a format dispute and his popularity slipped badly. Nevertheless, Penner stayed active in motion pictures, turning out one a year between 1934 and 1940.  Joe Penner died of a heart attack in 1941.  He was only 36 years old. 

80      THE MOLLE MYSTERY THEATER                                                                                                                                                                                Years Broadcast: 1943-1954     108 Points
Seasons Ranked: 8   Top 100 Seasons: 8   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 11th, 1950-51            Highest Season Rating: 15.2, 1948-49
Highest Monthly Rating: 22.1, Nov 1948      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors:  Bernard Lenrow,  Alfred Shirley, Robert Carroll. 

​A Detective By Any Other Name.  The half-hour program was originally an anthology of adaptations of mystery stories from top crime novelists, titled for its sponsor, Molle Shaving Cream. It was transformed into a Frank & Anne Hummert detective series , Hearthstone of The Death Squad, in 1948, and Mark Sabre in 1951. 

79      THE MANHATTAN MERRY GO ROUND                                               
                                                                                                        Years Broadcast: 1932-1949   109 Points
Seasons Ranked: 17   Top 100 Seasons: 17  Top 50 Seasons: 9   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 22nd, 1935-36              Highest Season Rating: 17.1, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 21.7, Jan 1948          Months Rated Number One: 0.
Leads: Jean Sargent, David Percy, Gene Rodemich Orch. & Chorus, (1932-33); David Percy, Jacques Renard  Orch.& Chorus, (1933-34); Rachel Carlay, Andy Sannella Orch. & Chorus, (1934-36); Abe Lyman Orch, Chorus & Guests, (1936-37); Conrad Thibault,  Thomas L. Thomas, Victor Arden Orch & Chorus, (1937-49).

​Catching Radio's Brass Ring. Frank & Anne Hummert's show debuted on Blue’s Sunday schedule at 3:30 p.m. in November, 1932.  The concept showcased the week’s most popular songs in an imaginary half-hour tour of New York City night spots.  Manhattan Merry Go Round’s eight song play lists were billed as determined by record and sheet music sales plus listener requests, (…”with lyrics sung so clearly you can understand every word…”).   The show was moved to its longtime Sunday night home on NBC at 9:00 on April 2, 1933, when the Hummerts bought the entire hour for their biggest client, Sterling Drug.  Destined to become one of Sunday's All Time Top Ten shows, Manhattan Merry Go Round, followed by The American Album of Familiar Music combined to occupy the hour until 1949.  
  
78      THIS IS YOUR FBI                 Years Broadcast: 1945-1953       111 Points
Seasons Ranked: 8   Top 100 Seasons: 8   Top 50 Seasons: 6   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 22nd, 1948-49           Highest Season Rating: 18.0, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 21.7, Jan 1948       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Narrator:  Dean Carlton, (1947-48); William Woodson,  (1948-53). 
Lead Actor:  Stacy Harris, (1948-53)​

ABC's Historic History Show.  This Is Your FBI  became Friday’s top rated program in 1947-48 and one of Friday's All Time Top Ten programs.  It led a pack of four programs including Break The Bank, The Fat Man and The Lone Ranger that won the night for ABC - the network’s best nightly showing in 13 years, going back to 1934-1935 when it was known as the Blue Network.  

76      THE SINCLAIR MINSTRELS                                                                  
                                                                                                     Years Broadcast: 1932-1937     112 Points
Seasons Ranked: 5   Top 100 Seasons: 5   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 12th, 1933-34            Highest Season Rating: 24.4, 1933-34
​Highest Monthly Rating: 26.5, Feb 1934       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Host:  Gene Arnold

Hot Dog! The program was originally called The Sinclair Weiner Minstrels, the odd sausage-like reference due to the nickname of its originating Blue Network station, WENR/Chicago.  Along with Pick & Pat's Model Minstrels on CBS, it was the second minstrel throwback to reach Monday's All Time Top Ten.

76      THE CITIES SERVICE CONCERTS                           
                                                                                                         Years Broadcast: 1927-1956   115 Points
Seasons Ranked: 21   Top 100 Seasons: 12   Top 50 Seasons: 4  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 16th, 1932-33               Highest Season Rating: 20.2, 1932-33
Highest Monthly Rating: 25.9, Sep 1933          Months Ranked Number One: 0.
Conductors:  Edwin Goldman, (1927), Rosario Bourdon, (1927-1938), Frank Black, (1938-1944), Paul Lavalle, (1944-1956).
Singing Leads: Jessica Dragonette, Frank Parker, Lucille Manners, Ross Graham.

It's A Gas! It was one of NBC’s first programs, debuting in February, 1927, just seven weeks after the network officially opened for business.  Soprano Jessica Dragonette joined the show in 1930.   It failed to make the Top 100 nine times  and made the Top 50 only during its first four years when Dragonette was its star.  But that was enough to make it one of Friday's All Time Top Ten.
 
73t      FRED WARING'S PENNSYLVANIANS                                
                                                                            Years Broadcast: 1933-1957  116 Points
Seasons Ranked: 16   Top 100 Seasons: 14  Top 50 Seasons: 6   Top Ten Seasons: 0  Highest Season Rank: 15th 1933-34               Highest Season Rating: 22.2, 1933-34
Highest Monthly Rating: 31.5, Sep 1933         Months Ranked Number One: 0.

Fred's Keystone Kids. Fred Waring's young ensemble had seven Top 50 programs in six seasons.  During the 1933-34 season his hour-long Thursday show for Ford ranked 15th and his half hour on Tuesday for Lorilard’s Old Gold cigarettes was 46th.  The handsome Waring's only featured film role was in Warner Brothers' 1937 musical comedy, Varsity Show, starring Dick Powell.  His television career was more lasting as General Electric's Sunday night attraction on CBS-TV from 1948 to 1954.

73t      H.V. KALTENBORN                    Years Broadcast: 1927-1955    116 Points
Seasons Ranked: 10   Top 100 Seasons: 7   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 21st, 1944-45             Highest Season Rating: 15.2, 1941-42
Highest Monthly Rating: 23.1, Feb  1942       Months Ranked Number One: 0.

A Newsman's Newsman.  Because of his rich accent, many listeners assumed that Hans von Kaltenborn was a German immigrant.  In reality, he was Milwaukee born, a Harvard graduate and past editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.  His 15-minute news commentaries were among the Multiple Run programs' Top Ten a total of nine times.  For the three seasons at the peak of World War II, 1942-43 to 1944-45, his program was Number One of the Multiple Runs.

73t       A DATE WITH JUDY             Years Broadcast: 1941-1950      116 Points
Seasons Ranked: 7   Top 100 Seasons: 7   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 13th, 1948-49           Highest Season Rating: 19.0, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 22.7, Feb 1948      Months Ranked Number One: 0.
Lead Actresses: Ann Gillis, (1941), Dellie Ellis, (1942), Louise Erickson, (1943-1950). 

She Sounds Familiar. Louise Erickson, Judy Foster for most of the show's run, also played The Great Gildersleeve's niece, Marjorie, during the early to mid 1940's.  In 1948, the loosely adapted MGM musical, A Date With Judy, was simply a showcase for 19 year-old soprano Jane Powell and 16 year-old starlet Elizabeth Taylor.

72      THE LIFE OF RILEY                   Years Broadcast: 1944-1951      117 Points
Seasons Ranked: 7   Top 100 Seasons: 6   Top 50 Seasons: 6   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 14th, 1947-48           Highest Season Rating: 20.1, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 25.3, Feb 1948      Months Ranked Number One: 0.
Lead Actor:  William Bendix 

Not really a revoltin' development... The successful series was preceded by a totally different 26 week sitcom of the same name in 1941 with Lionel Stander in the title role.  The William Bendix version, starting in 1944, become one of Friday's All Time Top Ten Shows.  Jackie Gleason took the title role of Chester A. Riley in the one-season, NBC-TV adaptation of the sitcom in 1948.  The 1949 Universal film version of The Life of Riley with William Bendix reprising his radio role scored well enough to inspire another attempt at television which was introduced on NBC-TV in 1953 when Bendix's busy film schedule allowed his commitment to a weekly television show.  The show was a hit and ran for six seasons.

70t      BOB BURNS                                       Years Broadcast: 1941-1947      118 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6   Top 100 Seasons: 6   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 20th, 1944-45           Highest Season Rating: 15.6, 1943-44
Highest Monthly Rating: 18.4, Jan 1944      Months Ranked Number One: 0.

The Big Star From Little Rock. Bob Burns got his big break as Bing Crosby's hillbilly sidekick for five years on NBC's Kraft Music Hall which led up to his first variety show, The Arkansas Traveler, on CBS in 1941. 

70t      THE BEAUTY BOX THEATER                                                                         
                                                                        Years Broadcast: 1934-1937      118 Points
Seasons Ranked: 4   Top 100 Seasons: 4   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top Ten Seasons: 2
Highest Season Rank: 8th, 1934-35             Highest Season Rating: 27.2, 1934-35
Highest Monthly Rating: 31.0, Jun 1934      Months Ranked Number One: 0.
Singing Leads:  Gladys Swarthout, (1933-36), Jessica Dragonette, (1936-37).
 
The Soprano Songbirds' Nest.  The program based on the popularity of its two leading sopranos, opened as 60 minutes on NBC in 1933.  It  moved to Blue in August, 1935, and remained until December, when  it moved to CBS in December and left the air in February, 1936.  It returned to CBS in January, 1937, as a 30 minute show.

69      ROBERT RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT                     
                                                                                                    Years Broadcast: 1933-1945      123 Points
Seasons Ranked: 7   Top 100 Seasons: 5   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 11th,1935-36.            Highest Season Rating: 18.6, 1933-34
Highest Monthly Rating: 20.5, Sep 1933      Months Rated Number One: 0.
​
Bobbing For Oddities. Although an introvert with "mike fright," famed newspaper cartoonist whose panel of oddities was seen worldwide, Ripley became a Network Radio and movie personality in the 1930's and an early television star a decade later. 

67t      GOOD NEWS                                   Years Broadcast: 1937-1940      124 Points
Seasons Ranked: 3   Top 100 Seasons: 3   Top 50 Seasons: 3   Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 6th, 1938-39              Highest Season Rating: 17.3, 1938-39
Highest Monthly Rating: 20.1, Dec 1939      Months Ranked Number One: 0
Various Hosts: James Stewart, Robert Taylor, Robert Young, Dick Powell, George Murphy.
Comedy Leads:  Frank Morgan & Fanny Brice.

Good To The Last Second. A Thursday night variety hour with a $25,000 weekly budget guaranteed by General Foods' Maxwell House, (Good To The Last Drop) Coffee, the collaboration between NBC and MGM boosted its audience in New York City by broadcasting the show simultaneously on NBC’s WEAF and MGM-owned WHN for its first two seasons.   MGM took claim to the title Good News with its 1930 musical comedy based on the Broadway hit from 1927.  The studio remade the college themed musical in 1947 starring Peter Lawford and June Allison. 

67t      THE VOICE OF FIRESTONE                                                            
                                                                          Years Broadcast: 1928-1957    124 Points
Seasons Ranked: 21  Top 100 Seasons: 20  Top 50 Seasons: 8  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 13th, 1932-33.            Highest Season Rating: 21.8, 1932-33
Highest Monthly Rating: 23.9, Dec 1933        Months Rated Number One: 0.
Directors:  William Daly, (1932-36), Alfred Wallenstein, (1936-43), Howard Barlow, (1943-53).

Prestige Over Ratings.  The Voice of Firestone is the only program to run all 21 years of the Golden Age on the same network at the same day and time.  It both opened and closed in the season’s Top 50 but struggled in the years between, failing to make the list from 1939 to 1951.  Nevertheless, it scored enough points over its many years to become one of Monday's All Time Top Ten programs.

66      INNER SANCTUM                             Years Broadcast: 1940-1951   128 Points
Seasons Ranked: 11   Top 100 Seasons: 10   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 19th, 1949-50.              Highest Season Rating: 18.6, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 22.6, Jan 1948          Months Rated Number One: 0.
Host:  Raymond Edward Johnston, Paul McGrath.
​
''(chuckle) Good Eveening, Friends..." Inner Sanctum was best known for its "squeaking door" sound effect in its weekly program opening and closing marking the entrance and exit of Raymond, Your (G)host. Its macabre stories, often with a humorous twist, pushed the half-hour into Monday's All Time Top Ten.

65      HORACE HEIDT                        Years Broadcast: 1932-1953    130 Points
Seasons Ranked: 17  Top 100 Seasons: 15  Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 10, 1939-40.               Highest Season Rating: 18.0, 1939-40
Highest Monthly Rating: 25.4, Feb 1940        Months Rated Number One: 0
Programs Hosted:  Answers By The Dancers, (1932), The Alemite Brigadeers Orchestra, (1935-39), Pot O Gold, (1939-41), Tums Treasure Chest, (1940-44), Heidt Time For Hires, (1944-46), The Youth Opportunity Program, (1947-52), The American Way, (1952-53).

The Heidt of Showmanship. Bandleader/host Horace Heidt had two shows for Lewis-Howe’s Tums Antacid tablets running concurrently throughout the 1940-41 season: Pot of Gold on Blue at 8:00 on Thursday and Tums Treasure Chest on NBC at 8:30 on Tuesday.  Amazingly, each program finished the ten-month season with a rating of 9.7 and tied for 53rd in the annual rankings.  It was just one of the oddities of Heidt's career that ran the course of the Golden Age.

64      VOX POP                                                   Years Broadcast: 1935-1948     132 Points
Seasons Ranked: 13  Top 100 Seasons 13  Top 50 Seasons:  8  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 28th, 1945-46.             Highest Season Rating: 13.6, 1942-43
Highest Monthly Rating: 16.1, Dec 1942        Months Rated Number One: 0.
Co-Hosts: Parks Johnson & Jerry Belcher, (1935-36), Parks Johnson & Wally Butterworth, (1936-42), Parks Johnson & Warren Hull, (1942-48).

Making Stars of The People. Roving interview show Vox Pop was the most successful of three audience participation shows imported from local Texas stations to the networks - the others being Dr. I.Q. and Darts For Dough. It was among Monday's All Time Top Ten programs.

63      BLONDIE                                                   Years Broadcast: 1939-1950    135 Points
Seasons Ranked: 10  Top 100 Seasons: 10  Top 50 Seasons: 8   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 24th, 1943-44,1947-48 Highest Season Rating: 18.1, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 22.6, Jan 1948         Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors: Penny Singleton & Arthur Lake, (1939-1949); Ann Rutherford & Arthur Lake (1949-50). 

Another Kind of Strip Show.  The radio sitcom had a ten year multi-network run while Singleton and Lake filmed a total of 28 Blondie comedies for Columbia, all based on the popular Chic Young comic strip.  

62      WE, THE PEOPLE                       Years Broadcast: 1937-1951    139 Points
Seasons Ranked: 14  Top 100 Seasons: 14  Top 50 Seasons:  6   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 15th, 1939-40, 1940-41 Highest Season Rating: 15.5, 1939-40
Highest Monthly Rating: 20.2, Feb 1940         Months Rated Number One: 0.
Hosts: Gabriel Heatter, (1937-42), Milo Boulton, (1943-47), Dwight Weist, (1947-1949), Dan Seymour, (1949-1951).

Don't Forget The Comma. The Phillips H. Lord interview program, which few listeners realized was a companion program to his Gangbusters, was known as We,The People At War for the three seasons during World War II, 1942-43 to 1944-45.

60t      LIFE WITH LUIGI                          Years Broadcast: 1948-1953     141 Points
Seasons Ranked: 4    Top 100 Seasons: 4   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top Ten Seasons: 2
Highest Season Rank: 8th, 1952-53              Highest Season Rating: 11.9, 1949-50
Highest Monthly Rating: 14.1, Mar 1950       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actor:   J. Carrol Naish.   Supporting Cast:  Alan Reed, Hans Conried, Gil Stratton, Mary Shipp.

Stereotypes Served With Spaghetti Sauce.  The Italian accented Cy Howard sitcom was carried on a sustaining basis by CBS on Tuesdays and Sundays in the 1948-49 season before Wrigley Gum picked it up.  Luigi became one of Tuesday's All Time Top Ten shows, joining Howard's other hit, My Friend Irma, on Mondays.

​60t      PHIL HARRIS & ALICE FAYE                                                               
                                                                                                     Years Broadcast: 1946-1954     141 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6   Top 100 Seasons: 6    Top 50 Seasons: 6   Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 9th, 1947-48              Highest Season Rating: 22.1, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 26.0, Mar 1948       Months Rated Number One: 0.

The Queen & Her Jester. Singing bandleader/comedian Phil Harris had a Top 50 show of his own, Let’s Listen To Phil Harris, in the 1933-34 season on Blue finishing in 43rd place.  He joined Jack Benny's comedy troupe in October, 1942.  Blonde Alice Faye was the Queen of 20th Century Fox musicals of the late 1930's and early 1940's when she and Harris were married in 1941 - a union that lasted for 54 years.  They made their first appearance as a team in a guest shot on the low-rated CBS Sunday night revue, Request Performance, in 1946, which led to their taking over NBC's Fitch Bandwagon in September.  
​
59      JOAN DAVIS                                      Years Broadcast: 1941-1950     146 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6   Top 100 Seasons: 5   Top 50 Seasons: 4   Top Ten Seasons: 2
Highest Season Rank: 7th, 1944-45              Highest Season Rating: 21.5, 1944-45
Highest Monthly Rating: 25.7, Feb 1944       Months Rated Number One: 0.

The Last Laugh Comes Early. Already a recognized film comedienne since 1936, Joan Davis replaced John Barrymore as Rudy Vallee’s Sealtest Show stooge on NBC in November, 1941.  When Vallee joined the Coast Guard in 1943, Davis and Jack Haley took over the NBC Thursday  night program, re-titled The Sealtest Village Store. It became a Top Ten show for two seasons.  Davis jumped to CBS in 1945 to star in Joanie's Tea Room. and lost nearly two-thirds of her audience in 1947-48 when she moved on the CBS schedule from Wednesday to Saturday and plummeted from 20th to 140th in the annual rankings when pitted against Frank Sinatra’s return to Your Hit Parade. 

​Joan Davis suffered a fatal heart attack at age 54 in 1961.  Her daughter, mother and two grandsons were all killed two years later in a house fire that engulfed their Palm Springs home. 

​58      AL PEARCE’S GANG               Years Broadcast: 1934-1947     150 Points
Seasons Ranked:  8   Top 100 Seasons: 7   Top 50 Seasons: 6   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 15th, 1937-38             Highest Season Rating: 14.8, 1937-38
Highest Monthly Rating: 17.8  Feb 1938        Months Rated Number One: 0.

The Gang's All Here! Guitar strumming Al Pearce and his brother Cam were hired in 1929 by San Francisco’s KFRC for its The Happy Go Lucky Hour.  Their show became a regional hit on the Don Lee West Coast network.  During this period, Pearce developed a number of routines for his variety of character voices, including Elmer Blurt, the painfully shy door-to-door salesman who’d knock on doors and mutter, “Nobody’s home, I hope, I hope, I hope…”  

Pearce surrounded himself with an ensemble of talented comics and singers and the show became known as Al Pearce’s Gang.  Prominent in this group were fast-talking Morey Amsterdam, Arlene Harris, ("The Human Chatterbox"), “Laughing Lady” Kitty O’Neil, Harry Stewart as Pearce’s Scandinavian stooge, Yogi Yorgesson, and Bill Comstock as falsetto-voiced Tizzie Lish, the show’s “cooking expert.”  When the show finally found a temporary home on Blue’s schedule on Fridays at 9:00 in January, 1936,  Pearce’s Gang numbered almost 20 and the result was a well-rounded variety revue.  Ford Motors moved the show to CBS the following January on Tuesdays at 9:00 and Pearce began a string of six consecutive Top 50 seasons despite four shifts between CBS and NBC and six different day and time changes during the next seven years.  

Al Pearce’s film career amounted to five low-budgeted movies for Republic Pictures.  
 
57      ED WYNN                                                 Years Broadcast: 1932-1945     152 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6   Top 100 Seasons: 5   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 3
Highest Season Rank: 2nd, 1932-33             Highest Season Rating: 40.5  1932-33
Highest Monthly Rating: 47.1  Mar 1933       Months Rated Number One: 3.
​
No Fooling! Ed Wynn was the first comedy star to appear on radio, starring in an adaptation of his Broadway hit, The Perfect Fool, from the Newark studios of WJZ on February 19, 1922.  His Texaco Fire Chief show on NBC registered three Top Ten seasons - enough to rank him among Tuesday's All Time Top Ten programs. 

56      PAUL WHITEMAN                       Years: 1932-1946                        153 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6   Top 100 Seasons: 6   Top 50 Seasons: 5  Top Ten Seasons: 2
Highest Season Rank: 7th, 1935-36             Highest Season Rating: 26.3  1933-34
Highest Monthly Rating: 33.2  Sep 1933      Months Rated Number One: 0.

Pops Goes The Music.  The rotund “King of Jazz” was the first band leader to expand his group from a small collection of sidemen to a stage-full of talented soloists and singers - a path later followed by Fred Waring and Lawrence Welk.

Whiteman’s troupe was the breeding ground for future stars, most notably Bix Beiderbecke, the Dorsey brothers, Jack Teagarden, Henry Busse, Mildred Bailey and Bing Crosby, who all referred to him as “Pops“.  Always the entrepreneur, Whiteman controlled a number of bands in the early 1920’s traveling under his name and management.  With the large income from his many enterprises, Whiteman commissioned George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, which was introduced by his band and pianist Gershwin in 1924’s historic Experiment In Modern Music concert performed at New York’s Aeolian Hall.  

Whiteman helped put CBS on the map with his Old Gold Hour, beginning on February 5, 1929, which ran on Tuesday nights at 9:00 until May 6, 1930,  and earning him $5,000 a week.  His greatest radio success began in the summer of 1933 when he became the first host of NBC's Kraft Music Hall.  With the powerful Maxwell House Showboat lead-in and frequent guest star Al Jolson, Whiteman's show was a solid hit for the three seasons.  

A decade later, the new management team at the Blue network, sold by NBC in mid-1943, remembered how Whiteman’s Old Gold Hour had helped vault CBS into the big time in 1929.  Thinking he could do the same for Blue, they hired the 53 year old bandleader as the network’s Music Director.  His first assignment was to co-host the chain’s first hour-long variety extravaganza, The Radio Hall of Fame.  Philco sponsored the expensive show laden with big name guest stars on Sunday nights at 6:00.  Critics praised The Radio Hall of Fame but listeners ignored it.  The show limped along in single digit ratings for three and a half seasons, never reaching the Top 100 list of programs.  Nevertheless, Whiteman remained on the air in various ABC sustaining and otherwise unrated programs until 1954

55      THE BIG STORY                           Years Broadcast: 1947-1955      155 Points
Seasons Ranked: 7   Top 100 Seasons: 7   Top 50 Seasons: 6   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 13th,1952-53            Highest Season Rating: 16.1, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 18.7, Jan 1948       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Host:  Bob Sloane.

"Extra! Extra! Hear All About It!"  An eight year staple on NBC's Wednesday night schedule, American Tobacco's  The Big Story glorified the individual work of newspaper and wire service reporters with dramatized, (and often fiction-assisted), accounts of their work and scoops, for which the newsmen were rewarded with $500.  The show registered six consecutive finishes in Wednesday's Top Ten, from 1947-48 to 1952-53 and ranks as one of Wednesday's  All Time Top Ten programs.

54      DUFFY’S TAVERN                        Years Broadcast: 1940-1951    156 Points
Seasons Ranked: 11  Top 100 Seasons: 10  Top 50 Seasons: 6  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 11th  1948-49             Highest Season Rating: 20.0, 1947-48
Highest Monthly Rating: 25.4, Feb 1948        Months Rated Number One: 0.

The Elite Meets To Laugh.  Ed Gardner was a highly regarded Network Radio producer for the J. Walter Thompson ad agency when he devised the weekly sitcom set in the lower Manhattan pub, where, "...the elite meet to eat."  The show, starring Gardner as Archie The Bartender, began its eleven year run with two mediocre seasons on CBS followed by two more on Blue.  Then in 1944 it moved to NBC for good - in more ways then one.  After two encouraging seasons beginning in 1944-45, Duffy's Tavern shot into the Top 15 for three straight seasons beginning in 1946-47, sandwiched between The Great Gildersleeve and Mr. District Attorney on NBC's Wednesday night schedule.

​53      JACK HALEY                                     Years Broadcast: 1937-1947      163 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6   Top 100 Seasons: 6   Top 50 Seasons: 5   Top Ten Seasons: 2
Highest Season Rank: 7th  1944-45             Highest Season Rating: 21.5, 1944-45
Highest Monthly Rating: 25.7, Feb 1945      Months Rated Number One: 0.

The Tin Man Talks. Jack Haley was primarily a film actor specializing in musical comedies dating back to 1927.  General Foods capitalized on his movie fame by featuring him in its 26-week Saturday night Log Cabin Jamboree on NBC in 1937-38.  That led Haley to CBS and The Jack Haley Show in 1938-39.  Both shows were modest successes but nothing compared to what was ahead.  

Sealtest Dairies and NBC were looking to replace Rudy Vallee when the crooning bandleader turned comedian unexpectedly decided to join the U.S. Coast Guard in 1943 at age 42.  Jack Haley was ready to return to radio and he was coupled with Joan Davis to headline The Sealtest Village Store, an immediate Top Ten hit that scored 21.4 ratings for two consecutive seasons.  When Davis was replaced after two seasons by Eve Arden, the ratings stumbled to push The Village Store's rankings down to 13th and 36th over the next two seasons when Jack Haley left Network Radio to resume his film career which extended for anther two decades.

51t      THE MARCH OF TIME      Years Broadcast: 1931-1945     164 Points
Seasons Ranked: 10  Top 100 Seasons: 8  Top 50 Seasons: 6   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 17th  1934-35           Highest Season Rating: 21.5, 1934-35
Highest Monthly Rating: 24.1, Jan 1935      Months Rated Number One: 0.

Time Magazine Issues A Hit.  The radio version of The March of Time preceded the famed motion picture series of two-reel "short subjects" of the same name by four years.  Narrator of the radio program in the early 1930's was Harry Von Zell, who relinquished the role young Westbrook Van Voorhees in 1935.   Van Voorhees became the "Voice of Time" in both radio and films for the next two decades.

​51t      LOUELLA PARSONS             Years Broadcast: 1931-1953   164 Points
Seasons Ranked: 10  Top 100 Seasons: 10   Top 50 Seasons: 7   Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 10th  1935-36              Highest Season Rating: 17.5, 1934-35
Highest Monthly Rating: 22.0, Sep 1935         Months Rated Number One: 0.

Lolly Pops In The Ratings.  Louella (​Lolly) Parsons established herself in 1925 as the movie columnist for Hearst Newspapers’ Los Angeles Examiner.  At the peak of her popularity, Parson’s column was syndicated to 600 daily papers worldwide.  She began her career as radio’s leading interviewer of movie stars at age of 50 on CBS’s short-lived Sunkist Cocktail in 1931.  That led to her ability to enlist major movie stars to appear and perform on her programs in exchange for praise in her columns.  She often boasted during her role as hostess of the CBS hit, Hollywood Hotel, that she could obtain, “A million dollars in talent for nothing.“   

That arrangement ended in 1938 when the newly formed American Federation of Radio Artists union, (AFRA), negotiated agreements with CBS and NBC which mandated pay for all performers.  But Parsons returned to CBS in the spring of 1941 with Hollywood Premiere - a 30-minute combination of popular movie reenactments and interviews with their stars - who again agreed to appear for no fee.  This time both the Screen Actors Guild and AFRA pressured its members to boycott the program.  It was cancelled in November.

Parsons next radio stop was Hollywood Mystery Time  - which began with a short run on CBS in the summer of 1944 and moved in October to Blue’s Sunday schedule at  9:15 under the sponsorship of Andrew Jergens‘ Woodbury Soap.  Both Blue and Jergens were looking to capitalize on the Top Ten lead-in provided by Walter Winchell’s Jergens Journal at 9:00.  The strange half-hour mix of detective melodrama interspersed with Parsons’ gossip items and movie star interviews lost over 60% of Winchell’s audience and was cancelled in late December, 1945.  It was replaced at 9:15 a week later by Louella Parsons Hollywood News, a straight quarter-hour of Parson’s reports and interviews, again under Jergens sponsorship.  The one-two tandem of Hearst’s leading gossip columnists paid off.  Although bitter enemies vying for scoops behind the scenes, Winchell and Parsons combined to give ABC a competitive half hour on Sunday nights until 1952.

49t      MR. KEEN, TRACER OF LOST PERSONS                 
                                                                                                       Years Broadcast: 1937-1955   166 Points 
Seasons Ranked: 16  Top 100 Seasons: 12  Top 50 Seasons: 6  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 12th, 1949-50.            Highest Season Rating: 16.7, 1947-48.   
Highest Monthly Rating: 21.4, Feb 1948.       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actor: Bennett Kilpack, 1937-50; Arthur Hughes, 1950-53.
​
The Senior Citizen Super Hero.  Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons was among Thursday's All Time Top Ten programs.  It was also the predictably formatted detective series on Network Radio and became Frank & Anne Hummert’s sole entry in the All Time Top 50. Veteran radio actor Bennett Kilpack portrayed , “...the kindly old investigator,” for 15 of its 18 year run.  Arthur Hughes - better known to Hummert soap opera fans as Just Plain Bill - took title role in its final three years.  Jim Kelly served as his thick headed sidekick with an even thicker Irish brogue, Mike Clancy, (“Saynts prazuve us, Mister Keen!”). 

Beginning in 1937, Mr. Keen bounced around Blue and CBS for six years in the Hummerts’ specialty, a Multiple Run, 15 minute serial format.   The melodrama finally reached its years of greatest popularity in the 1947-48 season, four years after it was converted into a weekly, self-contained half hour when Keen began pursuing murderers instead of missing persons.  The program is cited by broadcast historians as one of Network Radio’s most contrived series, demonstrating the Hummerts’ successful practices of low cost production combined with writing that never underestimated their listener’s attention span.  

49t      HOLLYWOOD HOTEL       Years Broadcast: 1934-1939     166 Points
Seasons Ranked: 5  Top 100 Seasons:  5   Top 50 Seasons:  5   Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 10th, 1935-36.          Highest Season Rating: 17.5, 1934-35.
Highest Monthly Rating: 22.0, Sep 1935.     Months Rated Number One: 0
Hosts: Louella Parsons, (1934-38), William Powell, (1938-39).

​No Reservations Needed.  Louella Parsons’ gushy, “Hel-lo from Hollywood!,” introduced her weekly parade of movie star guests, some speaking for the first time on radio, a novelty in the era of New York and Chicago based broadcasts. Hollywood Hotel wasn’t the first CBS show to exploit the movie colony - Borden’s 45 Minutes In Hollywood debuted in January, 1933.  Both programs were pioneers in Network Radio’s shift to Los Angeles based production.  

Hollywood Hotel, one of Friday's All Time Top Ten shows, was a catch-all hour with Hearst movie columnist Parsons interviewing film stars, more stars appearing, (gratis), in short adaptations of current films and a song or two from Dick Powell or Frances Langford.  Parsons left the show in its final year and actor William Powell, at the height of his Thin Man movie popularity, hosted the program with no appreciable loss of audience.  Hollywood Hotel’s menu of movie stars furthered the image of five year old CBS as the network with Hollywood connections - an image that Lux Radio Theater would cement in 1936. 

After three seasons in the Annual Top 20, Hollywood Hotel was at its peak when Warner Brothers released its movie musical of the same name in January, 1938, starring Dick Powell with Louella Parsons and Frances Langford in featured roles.   Directed by Busby Berkeley, the film pulls out all the musical production number stops typical of Berkeley’s films and spices the story with swinging sets by the Benny Goodman orchestra with sidemen Harry James, Gene Krupa, Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton.  Buried deep in the huge cast of un-credited studio players populating Warner’s adaptation of Hollywood Hotel are future stars Carole Landis, Susan Hayward and Ronald Reagan.

48      JUDY CANOVA                  Years Broadcast: 1943-1953      167 Points
Seasons Ranked: 9  Top 100 Seasons:  9  Top 50 Seasons:  8   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 22nd, 1946-47.         Highest Season Rating: 17.3, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 20.6, Jan 1948.     Months Rated Number One: 0.

The Hill-filly Queen. Dubbed “The Ozark Nightingale,“ multi-talented Judy Canova had years of stage experience and a dozen movies behind her when she debuted on Network Radio as a star the age of 30 in 1943.  She shot immediately into the season’s Top 50 and stayed there for nine years, becoming one of Saturday's All Time Top Ten.  The patriotic Canova would typically close her radio show during World War II with the ballad, Goodnight, Soldier, while selling U.S. War Bonds over its instrumental bridge. After the war her closing theme became the song most closely identified with her, Go To Sleepy, Little Baby, a lullaby which she again used as a background for farewell messages to her listeners.  Judy Canova appeared in over 20 films, starring in a dozen B movie musicals with rural settings from 1940 to 1955 for Republic and Columbia Pictures. Many of their titles say it all: Joan of Ozark, Oklahoma Annie, Carolina Cannonball, Chatterbox, Puddin’ Head and Singin’ In the Corn.  

47      EVE ARDEN                                            Years Broadcast: 1945-1957    170 Points
Seasons Ranked: 8  Top 100 Seasons:  8    Top 50 Seasons:  6  Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 6th, 1952-53.             Highest Season Rating: 16.9, 1945-46.
Highest Monthly Rating: 21.5, Feb 1946.      Months Rated Number One: 0
Programs:  The Ken Murray Show, (1935-37), The Danny Kaye Show, (1944-45), The Sealtest Village Store, (1945-48), Our Miss Brooks, (1948-1957).

The Teacher's Report Card.  Born Eunice Quedens in 1908, Eve Arden had showgirl looks and a sharp tongue which propelled her into movie stardom - usually as the female star’s wise-cracking best friend.  She was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for such a role in 1945's Mildred Pierce, released the same season she moved into NBC’s Sealtest Village Store, replacing Joan Davis as Jack Haley’s co-star. Nevertheless, Arden will forever be remembered as Connie Brooks, the lovable, husband-hungry high school teacher, Our Miss Brooks.  

The sitcom debuted in 1948 and ran for five seasons on CBS Radio, the final four in the prime Sunday 6:30 slot just ahead of Jack Benny at 7:00 and all four among the annual Top 50..  The show gained in popularity with each year until it peaked as a Top Ten show in the 1952-53 season.  Like other radio successes, Our Miss Brooks transitioned into television in 1952 with Arden and many of her supporting cast members recreating roles they had established on radio.  Eve Arden’s four year run on CBS-TV climaxed with the 1956 Warner Brothers film Our Miss Brooks, co-starring Gale Gordon, Richard Crenna, Jane Morgan and Gloria McMillan, all from her radio and television series.  

46      THE FBI IN PEACE & WAR                                                   
                                                                       Years Broadcast: 1944-1958       171 Points
Seasons Ranked: 9  Top 100 Seasons: 9  Top 50 Seasons:  8   Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 22nd (3),1948-49, 1950-51, 1951-52.
Highest Season Rating: 15.7, 1947-48.  Highest Monthly Rating: 21.5, Jan 1948.      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors:  Martin Blaine & Donald Briggs  

"The Program You Are About To Hear Is Fiction."  The FBI In Peace & War was the strongest of two popular sound-alike salutes to J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation in the postwar years, debuting on the CBS Saturday schedule in the fall of 1944 as World War II was within a year of Allied victory. (This Is Your FBI was ABC’s successful Friday entry in April, 1945, just a month before VE Day.)  

Both programs scored Top Ten finishes on their respective nights of broadcast from 1946 through 1953.  The two not only sounded alike but earned similar ratings - actually tying for 22nd place in the 1948-49 season with identical 14.6 ratings.  Both remained in the annual Top 50 lists until the close of Network Radio’s Golden Age in 1953 when This Is Your FBI left the air.  The FBI In Peace & War remained on the CBS schedule until 1958 and was among Thursday's All Time Top Ten programs.  

45       BUD ABBOTT & LOU COSTELLO                                   
                                                                         Years Broadcast: 1940-1949     182 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6   Top 100 Seasons: 5   Top 50 Seasons:  5   Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 10th, 1943-44.           Highest Season Rating: 21.3, 1943-44.
Highest Monthly Rating:                                Months Rated Number One: 

"Hey, Abb...bbot!"  William “Bud” Abbott was a down on his luck in 1931.  The Great Depression had cost the 36 year old entrepreneur his chain of four New York burlesque houses and he had to take a job as cashier at the Empire Burlesque Theater in Brooklyn.  Burlesque comic Lou Costello, 25, was playing the Empire at the time and he was also in a fix - his partner had fallen ill and Costello needed a straight man.  Abbott was familiar with Costello’s routines and volunteered to stand in.  Ten years later Abbott & Costello was the hottest comedy act in show business and they were on their way to becoming famous and wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. 

The lanky 5’8” Abbott and the rotund Costello, who was three inches shorter and 75 pounds heavier, formalized their partnership in 1936, working burlesque and the few remaining vaudeville houses in major cities.  They built a following that led to a 1938 engagement at Loew’s State Theater in New York City and their first Network Radio guest appearance with Rudy Vallee on February 3, 1938.  Kate Smith’s producer/partner Ted Collins caught their act and immediately signed them to appear on the singer’s CBS radio show opposite Vallee. They were a hit and remained on the program for two seasons.  Their weekly segments introduced routines to radio that they’d perfected with hundreds of stage performances - including their signature Who’s On First? skit - and helped boost The Kate Smith Hour into a Top 20 attraction. 

Their appearances with Kate Smith also earned them a 13 week engagement as Fred Allen’s summer substitutes in June, 1940.  More importantly, their radio popularity also landed their first film contract with Universal Pictures which kept them busy for the next two years with the release of eight highly successful low budget comedies.

Abbott & Costello returned to Network Radio as full-fledged movie stars with a combined film income of $790,000 in October, 1942.  R. J. Reynolds’ Camel Cigarettes slotted them in NBC’s powerful Thursday night lineup at 10:00 where their 20.5 season rating helped give NBC nine of the night’s Top Ten programs.   Their first season’s success was cut short when Costello was stricken with rheumatic fever in March, 1943.  Out of loyalty - and perhaps sensing that a slowdown in their hectic schedule was needed to protect his own health - Abbott refused to work the radio series with another partner.  Camel replaced Abbott and Costello for the remainder of the season by the hastily formed team of Jimmy Durante & Gary Moore.

​Fate dealt another cruel blow to Costello when he returned to their NBC radio show on November 4, 1943.  He was called home during dress rehearsal and told that his year old son had drowned in the family swimming pool.  He returned to the studio several hours later in a state of shock and managed to make it through the broadcast as if nothing had happened before collapsing in grief. The rest of the year went without incident and became the team’s ratings peak in Network Radio, finishing among the season’s Top Ten programs.   

Abbott & Costello’s luck turned sour in 1947 when ABC lured them with the opportunity to transcribe their programs plus an additional show for children on Saturday mornings.  Their audience didn’t follow them to their new network home. In the 1947-48 season Abbott & Costello were left with only half the ratings of their NBC opposition on Wednesdays at 9:00,  Duffy’s Tavern, and their season ranking plummeted from 24th to 105th.     

It was the beginning of the end for Abbott & Costello’s meteoric Network Radio career.  They returned to ABC on Thursdays at 8:00 the following season against NBC’s Aldrich Family and The FBI In Peace & War on CBS.  In the few months their show was rated, their audience dropped another 50%.  The pair left ABC and prime time radio in June, 1949, never to return.

44       BEN BERNIE                           Years Broadcast: 1930-1943     185 Points  Seasons Ranked: 8  Top 100 Seasons:  8   Top 50 Seasons:  6   Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 8th 1933-34.             Highest Season Rating: 27.8, 1933-34.
Highest Monthly Rating: 33.7, Apr 1933.      Months Rated Number One: 0.

"Yowza, Yowza..." Classically trained violinist turned vaudevillian Ben Bernie was the former stage partner of another future Network Radio star, accordion playing comedian Phil Baker.  Bernie left their act in 1922 and formed a dance band a year later.  His “hot” band met with immediate nightclub and recording success.  The impact of Bernie’s introducing new songs like Ain’t She Sweet led to his being given co-composer credit for the popular standard Sweet Georgia Brown in 1925.

Ben Bernie’s band was one of the first to appear on radio from its earliest days at WJZ’s crude facilities in Newark to the elaborate debut broadcast of NBC in November, 1926, from the Waldorf Astoria.  The group’s first network series followed on Blue in 1930.  By 1932-33, Ben Bernie was an established radio star whose Tuesday night show ranked eleventh in the Crossley/CAB ratings enough to rank him among Tuesday's All Time Top Ten. He was still on the air ten years later with a CBS weekday series, Ben Bernie’s War Workers’ Program, when illness forced him off the air in January, 1943.  He died ten months later at age 52.

Ben Bernie’s first film appearance predated the sound era by several years.  Inventor Lee DeForest used Bernie’s band and teenage pianist Oscar Levant for a one reel short to demonstrate his Phonovision sound equipment in the early 1920’s.  Fox Studios followed suite in 1928 when Bernie and his “Lads” performed a demo short for the MovieTone process.  Warner Brothers produced yet another Bernie short in 1930 to show off its Vitaphone sound process.  The band’s last short was released in 1936 under the title Hark Ye Hark! 

Ben Bernie’s radio popularity led to his being was typecast as a bandleader in two Paramount features, 1934’s Shoot The Works and Stolen Harmony the following year.
During the 1930’s Ben Bernie and Walter Winchell created Network Radio’s first  famous “feud” - cross-promoting each other on their programs.  It never reached the proportion of the Jack Benny/Fred Allen “feud,” but did result in two 1937 20th Century Fox films starring the pair as themselves, Wake Up & Live and Love & Hisses. 

43       GUY LOMBARDO                Years Broadcast: 1928-1956     208 Points
Seasons Ranked: 13 Top 100 Seasons: 11 Top 50 Seasons:  8  Top Ten Seasons: 2
Highest Season Rank: 6th, 1933-34.            Highest Season Rating: 28.2, 1933-34.
Highest Monthly Rating: 33.3, Apr 1933.      Months Rated Number One:  0.

Music's Top Guy.  No dance band on Network Radio could match the long-term success of Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians.  The group scored at least one Top 50 season in each decade of the Golden Age and was off the air for only two of the era’s 21 years. Beginning on December 31, 1929, and every New Year's Eve thereafter, well beyond Network Radio's Golden Age and into the television era, Guy Lombardo's band playing his theme, Auld Lang Syne, became a broadcast tradition at the stroke of midnight.

​42        MY FRIEND IRMA               Years Broadcast: 1947-1954       209 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6  Top 100 Seasons:  6  Top 50 Seasons:  5  Top Ten Seasons: 4
Highest Season Rank: 5th, 1949-50.           Highest Season Rating: 22.2, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 28.3, Feb 1948.    Months Rated Number One: 1.
Lead Actress: Marie Wilson.

A Smart Producer + A Great Actress = A Top Ten Hit:  The addle-brained blonde's sitcom, combined with Lux Radio Theater and Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, gave Lever Brothers and CBS a lock on Monday night's Top Three programs for four consecutive seasons, from 1947-48 to 1950-51.  Cy Howard's first hit creation for CBS, My Friend Irma is among Monday's All Time Top Ten shows.

41       GROUCHO MARX                 Years Broadcast: 1932-1956     Points 210
Seasons Ranked: 10 Top 100 Seasons: 10 Top 50 Seasons:  6  Top Ten Seasons: 3
Highest Season Rank: 6th, 1951-52.             Highest Season Rating: 18.9, 1932-33.
Highest Monthly Rating: 22.1, Apr 1933.      Months Rated Number One: 1.

Groucho's Talk & Guedel's Tape Win Ratings. His savvy skill in editing taped segments of Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life quiz, gave producer John Guedel his second show in the All Time Top 50 to combine with People Are Funny.  The comedy quiz is also among Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.

40       SUSPENSE                               Years Broadcast:  1943-1953    212 Points
Seasons Ranked: 10  Top 100 Seasons: 10 Top 50 Seasons:  8  Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 9th, 1952-53.             Highest Season Rating: 16.4, 1948-49.
Highest Monthly Rating: 21.9, Dec 1948.      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Hosts:  Joseph Kearns & Ted Osborne, (1944-48);  Harlow Wilcox, (1948-53).

"Tales Well Caculated..."  No introduction of a program of Network Radio’s Golden Age generated the weekly anticipation of spooky fun ahead as in the late 1940’s when announcers George Walsh or Harlow Wilcox ominously intoned over slowly paced chimes and a bed of low-pitched reeds, “And now another tale well calculated to keep you in ..- (climactic sting) -…Sus...pense!”  It stood out enough to introduce one of Thursday's All Time Top Ten shows.

39       KATE SMITH                            Years Broadcast: 1931-1958      224 Points
Seasons Ranked:14  Top 100 Seasons: 14 Top 50 Seasons: 10  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 12th, 1940-41.          Highest Season Rating: 16.8, 1939-40
Highest Monthly Rating: 19.6, Jan 1940      Months Rated Number One: 0

The Fat Lady Sang...And Sang...And...  Kate Smith never learned to read music, yet she sold more records than any other female vocalist of her era and was the most popular female singer of Network Radio’s Golden Age becoming one of Friday's All Time Top Ten.  If the daytime audience of her weekday quarter-hour Kate Smith Speaks were tabulated into her prime time music shows, her ranking would be much higher.

38      THE MAXWELL HOUSE SHOWBOAT               
                                                                        Years Broadcast: 1932-1938      228 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6  Top 100 Seasons:  6  Top 50 Seasons:  6  Top Ten Seasons: 4
Highest Season Rank: 2nd, 1933-34, 1934-35. Highest Season Rating: 44.6, 1933-34.
Highest Monthly Rating: 49.7, Jan 1934.          Months Rated Number One: 6.  ​
Hosts: Charles Winninger, (1932-35), Frank McIntyre, (1935-37), Charles Winninger, (1937-38).

The Showboat Slowly Sinks. The first prime time program with Old South flavored Minstrel elements, General Food's early variety show on NBC's Thursday night schedule was centered on a Mississippi River show boat, much like the 1926 Edna Ferber novel and the next year's classic Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein Broadway musical.  Only the radio adaptation ignored its predecessor's serious attention to racial injustice.  Ranked among Network Radio's Top Five programs from 1932 to 1936, Showboat slipped in ratings in its last two seasons and was cancelled in 1938.  It ranks as one of Thursday's All Time Top Ten shows and remembered as today the starting point for popular radio tenor, Lanny Ross

37       DOCTOR CHRISTIAN          Years Broadcast: 1938-1954    239 Points
Seasons Ranked: 15  Top 100 Seasons: 15  Top 50 Seasons: 12  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 18th, 1951-52. Highest Season Rating: 13.9, 1945-46, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 17.7, Feb 1948.        Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actor: Jean Hersholt.  Supporting Actresses: Rosemary DeCamp, Lureen Tuttle. 

The Doctor Was In For 17 Years.  Danish born Jean Hersholt was already an established European stage and silent film actor when he emigrated to Hollywood in 1914 at the age of 28.  Learning his new language was no barrier in the era of silent films.  Hersholt appeared in nearly 80 silents by the time he appeared in his first picture with sound in 1930.  His first talking roles were primarily those as villains - far from the beloved character he would create for radio, Dr Paul Christian one of Wednesday's All Time Top Ten.

The long-running Dr. Christian was inspired by the busy Hersholt’s 40th picture with sound, a 1936 exploitation film loosely based on the birth of the five Dionne quintuplets, The Country Doctor.  Hersholt played the title role but was given billing beneath the two-year old quints.  Nevertheless, he firmly established the character of a caring small town physician who became involved in his patients’ lives.   Hersholt virtually retired from the movies when Dr. Christian became a weekly radio hit worthy of his full attention.  Six of his 14 films between 1938 and 1955 were RKO releases based on the radio series.  

36       THE FITCH BANDWAGON                                                                                                                                              Years Broadcast: 1938-1946       240 Points
Seasons Ranked: 9  Top 100 Seasons:  8  Top 50 Seasons:  8  Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 10th, 1942-43          Highest Season Rating: 16.1, 1942-43.
Highest Monthly Rating: 22.4, Jan 1940.    Months Rated Number One: 0
Hosts: Dick Powell, (1944-45), Cass Daley, (1945-46).

"Use Your Head, Save Your Hair, Use Fitch Shampoo..." Fred Fitch was a small town barber whose entrepreneurship made him a millionaire.  He was 22 when he concocted Fitch’s Ideal Hair Grower & Dandruff Cure, in his family’s barn near Boone, Iowa, in 1892.  He traveled the Midwest, successfully selling the tonic to barber and beauty shops.  His growing company moved to Des Moines in 1917 with  its expanded line of 40 shampoos and hair tonics which had expanded into retail stores nationwide, requiring a strong marketing effort.   

A proponent of hard sell mass advertising, Fitch stumbled into one of the best buys in Network Radio in 1935, when he bought 15 minutes in the Sunday half hour between Jack Benny and Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Hour on NBC. For two seasons Fitch sponsored Sunset Dreams, a quarter hour of vocals from Chicago’s Morin Sisters at 7:45.  He replaced the trio in 1937 with Interesting Neighbors, 15 minutes of interviews hosted by Jerry Belcher, one of the originators of Vox Pop.  

The entire half hour became available in early 1938 and Fitch saw opportunity.  He expanded Neighbors to fill the NBC time period between Benny and the nation’s new Number One show starring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy.  Interesting Neighbors became a Top 50 program and one of Sunday’s Top Ten, but it lacked the splashy glamour of its neighboring programs.  Fitch wanted something comparable to the star power of Benny and Bergen - yet within a reasonable budget.  He got it with a program ranked among Sunday's All Time Top Ten shows.

Fitch and his advertising agency headed by fellow Iowan L.W. “Buck” Ramsey found the answer in the late night dance band remotes popular on all the networks.  They created Fitch Bandwagon, which featured a different famous dance band every week.  Bandwagon gave Fitch the star power he wanted at a modest cost and it provided the bands with the prime time exposure they sought to sell records and promote their personal appearances.  Within the first three months of this win-win situation, Bandwagon offered its listeners the big bands of Bob Crosby,  Freddy Martin, Eddy Duchin, Tommy Dorsey, Sammy Kaye and Benny Goodman.  The program was an immediate hit, scoring eight consecutive Top 50 seasons and never falling from Sunday’s Top Ten.

The show began to change in 1944 when its budget was expanded to afford Dick Powell as its host and incorporate weekly guest stars into the format.  It drifted further from the original format in 1945 when the show brought in comedienne Cass Daley and a supporting sitcom cast, yet keeping the Bandwagon name and its high ratings.  The big band format and name were all but forgotten in 1946 when Fitch converted its half hour into the Phil Harris & Alice Faye sitcom  - the only remnants being songs performed by its stars every week.  Nevertheless, Fitch Bandwagon will always be remembered as the program that brought the big bands into big time radio.  

35       TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT         Years Broadcast: 1940-1952    246 Points
Seasons Ranked: 11  Top 100 Seasons: 11  Top 50 Seasons:  9  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 15th, (2) 1943-44, 1944-45 Highest Seas Rating: 19.2, 1943-44
Highest Monthly Rating: 22.6, Apr 1944.        Months Rated Number One: 0
Hosts: Bob Hawk, (1940-41), Phil Baker, (1941- 47), Garry Moore, (1947-48), Eddie Cantor, (1949-50), Jack Paar, (1951-52). 
​
"You'll Be Sorrrry!"  That was the catch-phrase shouted from the audience of Take It Or Leave It when contestants on the Sunday night quiz show dared to double their bets on correctly answering questions from $32 to $64.  Take It Or Leave it was a Sunday night fixture on Network Radio for its entire dozen years on the air.  It was also the first audience participation quiz show with a double or nothing format that depended on the comedic talents of its host(s).   The show was also the basis for a low-budget film, Take It Or Leave It, from 20th Century Fox in July, 1944, on the heels of the program’s first season as Network Radio’s top rated quiz show.    

The show’s format was the inspiration for television’s first big money jackpot quiz, The $64,000 Question, which debuted on CBS-TV in 1955 and immediately became the season’s top rated program.  It was abruptly cancelled in 1958 when - along with all of television’s big money games - it was accused of rigging.  

34       BOB HAWK                                Years Broadcast: 1939-1953    264 Points
Seasons Ranked: 13 Top 100 Seasons: 13  Top 50 Seasons:  9  Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 10th, 1951-52.            Highest Season Rating: 14.6, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 19.0, Dec 1948.       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Top 50 Seasons Network & Sponsor: 
Shows Hosted: Take It Or Leave It, (1940-41), Thanks To The Yanks, (1942-45), The Bob Hawk Show, (1945-53). 
   
The Radio Only Host:  Following on the heels of Monday's powerful lineup on CBS, Bob Hawk's audience participation quizzes scored eight seasons in the night's Top Ten.  Hawk considered himself strictly a radio personality and refused all film and television offers.  He left radio and retired with his show’s final broadcast in July, 1953, at the age of 45.  His shows continue to rank among Monday's All Time Top Ten.

33        ARTHUR GODFREY’S TALENT SCOUTS                        
                                                                         Years Broadcast: 1946-1956     266 Points
Seasons Ranked: 6  Top 100 Seasons:  6   Top 50 Seasons:  6  Top Ten Seasons: 5
Highest Season Rank: 3rd, 1949-50.             Highest Season Rating: 21.9, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 27.1, Mar 1948.        Months Rated Number One: 0.

An Old Idea In A New Medium: A member of Monday's All Time Top Ten,  Arthur Godfrey's weekly competition of talent became the first major Network Radio show to be regularly televised, beginning with its simulcast on CBS-TV on December 6, 1948, also sponsored by Lever Brothers' Lipton Tea.  Godfrey and his Talent Scouts show remained on CBS Radio until 1955 and CBS-TV until 1958. 

32       MR. & MRS. NORTH                 Years Broadcast: 1942-1954   268 Points 
Seasons Ranked: 11  Top 100 Seasons:  11 Top 50 Seasons: 11 Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 12th, 1950-51.                Highest Season Rating: 17.1, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 21.5, Jan 1948.       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors: Joseph Curtin & Alice Frost, (1942-51),  Richard Denning & Barbara Britton, (1951-53). 

Married To Murder. The husband and wife team of amateur detectives was created by a husband and wife team of writers, Francis & Richard Lockridge.  The lighthearted Mr. & Mrs. North was among Wednesday's Top Ten shows on NBC from 1942-43, (when it replaced The Thin Man), to 1946-47.  It moved to the CBS schedule on Tuesday nights in 1947-48, earning a high spot in that night's Top Ten for the next six seasons and a spot on Tuesday's All Time Top Ten.  

31        GANGBUSTERS                            Years Broadcast: 1936-1957    276 Points
Seasons Ranked: 18  Top 100 Seasons: 18  Top 50 Seasons: 12  Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 9th, 1952-53.       Highest Season Rating: 14.7, 1937-38, 1939-40
Highest Monthly Rating: 16.8, Mar 1940.         Months Rated Number One: 0.
Narrator/Hosts: Phillips H. Lord, (1936-38), Col H. Norman Schwarzkopf, (1938-45), Lewis J. Valentine, (1945-46).

Gangbusters Or Gang Busters? Phillips H. Lord's creation was preceded by the 13-week series, G-Men in the summer of 1936.  It failed to secure full government cooperation, so Lord stopped production and revised its format as Gangbusters, "...the only national program that brings you authentic police case histories."  Adding to the program's authenticity were its  weekly "Most Wanted" descriptions of actual fugitives from justice which resulted in hundreds of captures.  

Gangbusters, (aka Gang Busters​), was popular - achieving 15 seasons in the Annual Top 50.  In addition, it was among Wednesday's Top Ten from 1935-36 to 1938-39 and became Saturday's Number One program in 1938-39, all on CBS.  Switching to Blue it struggled for several seasons on Friday then returned to Saturday's Top Ten in 1946-47 where it remained until it peaked as the night's  Number One show in 1952-53.  

Lord also had a hand in co-writing  Universal Pictures’ 1942 serial that took the radio series’ name - but the resemblance ended there.  The 13-chapter Gangbusters, were challenged to bust “The League of Murdered Men,” headed by the mysterious Professor Mortis.  Lord was later the creator and producer of the 1952 television series Gangbusters which had a 26 week run on NBC-TV.  

30        PEOPLE ARE FUNNY      Years Broadcast: 1942-1960      299 Points
Seasons Ranked: 11 Top 100 Seasons: 11  Top 50 Seasons: 11    Top Ten Seasons: 3
Highest Season Rank: 5th, 1952-53.                  Highest Season Rating: 17.1, 1948-49 
Highest Monthly Rating: 21.6, Dec 1948.       Months Rated Number One: 0.  
Hosts:  Art Baker, (1942-43), Art Linkletter, (1943-53).  

One Show, Two Hits. The successful stunt show dates back to 1939 and producer John Guedel's early attempts, Pull Over, Neighbor and All Aboard which each had short runs on local Los Angeles stations.  People Are Funny is often compared to Truth Or Consequences, (Number 28), and the similarities are many.​  The Art Linkletter show stands out, however, for achieving both Tuesday's and Friday's All Time Top Ten lists.

29        AL JOLSON                                    Years Broadcast: 1932-1949       301 Points
Seasons Ranked: 9  Top 100 Seasons:  9 Top 50 Seasons:  9  Top Ten Seasons: 5
Highest Season Rank: 6th, 1938-39.              Highest Season Rating: 27.8, 1932-33.
Highest Monthly Rating: 30.5, Feb 1933.   Months Rated Number One: 0.
Programs Hosted:  Presenting Al Jolson, (1932-33), The Shell Chateau, (1935-36), The Lifebuoy Program aka The Tuesday Night Party, (1936-39), The Colgate Program, (1942-43), The Kraft Music Hall, (1947-49).

"You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet!" Billed as “The World’s Greatest Entertainer,” Al Jolson was an established film and Broadway star by 1930, comanding top dollars wherever he went.   His importance to radio became obvious in 1932 when his brief 15 week series for Chevrolet led all Friday night programs with a 27.8 rating.  

Ad agency J. Walter Thompson chose Jolson and Paul Whiteman to headline a special two hour NBC broadcast from 9:30 to 11:30 on June 26, 1933, designed to launch Kraft Foods’ new Miracle Whip salad dressing. After 90 minutes of music from Whiteman’s band laced with commercials for the new mayonnaise-like product - including an irresistible, “Double your money back if not satisfied!” guarantee -  Jolson was given the last half hour to close the show.  Nearing the end of his 30 minutes, Jolson had the studio audience whipped into a cheering frenzy and it was obvious that with his ad-libs and impromptu encores, he was far from finished.  Instead of cutting him off, the agency bought another 15 minutes of NBC airtime so Jolson could complete his act.  As a result,  Miracle Whip flew off grocers’ shelves the next day. 

​The long running Kraft Music Hall had begun with Whiteman and guest star Al Jolson whenever he was available.  Jolson’s twelve appearances cost $60,000, an enormous sum in Depression times.  But whenever he was on the show its ratings spiked and Kraft happily paid his fee. 

Jolson returned with his own series in April, 1935,, Shell Oil’s hour long Shell Chateau on NBC.   It became Saturday’s highest rated program for two seasons.  In December, 1936, Jolson moved to CBS for Lever Brothers.  His half hour Lifebouy Soap variety show was Tuesday’s Number One program for its first two seasons and then was edged out of its top spot by a fraction of a rating point by NBC’s  Fibber McGee & Molly in 1938-39   

The 1930’s gave Jolson his greatest successes in Network Radio.  His seven seasons produced six Top Ten programs and one that finished in eleventh place.  His shows rank among Tuesday's All Time Top Ten. It was a different story in the 1940’s.  Colgate-Palmolive brought him back to CBS on Tuesday in 1942 against Horace Heidt’s Tums Treasure Chest giveaway show on NBC.  Jolson barely won the time period and finished the season in 46th place among all network programs.  Word spread that Jolson’s time had passed, so he turned his talents to entertaining U.S. troops by tirelessly touring stateside camps and making the rounds in Europe, Africa and the South Pacific, where he contracted malaria,.  The disease nearly killed the 58 year old singer in 1944.

Jolson‘s fortunes turned in 1946 with the release of his filmed biography, The Jolson Story, starring actor Larry Parks in the title role, lip-synching two dozen of the singer’s standards plus the new Anniversary Song which became an immediate hit record for Jolson. The movie was an international box office success and Jolson was once again in demand.   
 
Kraft Music Hall producers approached him in early 1947 to host the program which had suffered since Bing Crosby left it in 1946.  Jolson returned to the scene of his radio triumph of 14 years past in October, 1947, for $7,500 a week.  It was a comeback season for both the show and its star.  Kraft Music Hall was once again Thursday’s Number One program. It was a different story in 1948-49 when the Thursday wave of CBS mystery shows overtook NBC’s variety lineup and Kraft Music Hall lost over 30% of its ratings - dropping to 38th among the season’s Top 50.  Kraft cancelled its 16 year old Music Hall in 1949 and Jolson left Network Radio.

Al Jolson died in October, 1950, one month after a grueling tour entertaining U.S. troops in Korea.  The star who always demanded top dollar paid all of the tour’s expenses himself.
​
28        TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES                                                           
                                                                          Years Broadcast: 1940-1956    308 Points
Seasons Ranked: 12 Top 100 Seasons: 12  Top 50 Seasons: 12  Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 6th, 1947-48.               Highest Season Rating: 22.3, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 28.0, Feb 1948.          Months Rated Number One: 0.
Host:  Ralph Edwards.
​
An Angel In Devil's Disguise.  Truth Or Consequences began as a local show sponsored by Procter & Gamble on CBS’s WABC/New York City in late March, 1940.  The stunt show led by Ralph Edwards who often chuckled, "Aren't we devils?", was scheduled following Your Hit Parade on Saturday at 9:45 while the rest of the network was fed Pet Milk’s Saturday Night Serenade.  After its successful 13 week New York local run,  P&G promoted the show into the big time on NBC’s Saturday schedule where it quickly became the night’s Number One program, more than doubling the ratings of  its CBS competition in its 8:30 time period, Duffy’s Tavern.   It was the first of five seasons that Truth Or Consequences would be Saturday’s most popular program and become one of Saturday's All Time Top Ten shows.  In addition, Truth Or Consequences became the source for millions of dollars in World War II Defense Bond Sales and postwar charities.    

27        FIRST NIGHTER                    Years Broadcast: 1930-1953    309 Points
Seasons Ranked: 16  Top 100 Seasons: 14  Top 50 Seasons: 10  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 12th, 1935-36.                 Highest Season Rating: 23.7, 1933-34.
Highest Monthly Rating: 28.0, Apr 1934.          Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors: Don Ameche & June Meredith, (1932-34); Don Ameche & Betty Lou Gerson, (1935-36); Les Tremayne & Barbara Luddy, (1936-42); Olan Soule & Barbara Luddy, (1942-53).

Broadway On Lake Michigan. First Nighter, (aka The First Nighter Program), was one the longest running dramatic series of Network Radio’s Golden Age - spanning 18 years on all four networks from 1930 until 1953.  All but its last season were sponsored by the Batavia, Illinois, cosmetics manufacturer Campana for its Italian Balm Hand Lotion.

In reality, First Nighter was the second of two similarly formatted light dramatic anthologies sponsored by Campana.  Its forerunner, Grand Hotel, premiered two months earlier on local Chicago radio and continued for a three year network run including one Top 50 season.  Both shows were predominately romantic comedies and each featured the same lead actors week after week, usually for years on end.  Only the introductory setups to the shows were different - and that’s what set First Nighter apart from its predecessor and every other show on Network Radio.  

Grand Hotel was set in a metropolitan hotel.  Its weekly opening featured the hotel’s switchboard operator who "connected" listeners to the rooms and the stories within them. 
First Nighter had a far more elaborate opening.  The program’s host, known only as “Mr. First Nighter,” (originally Charles Hughes, succeeded by MacDonald Carey, Brett Morrison, Marvin Miller, Don Briggs and Ray Billsbury), escorted his listeners through the sounds of busy New York street, into a waiting taxi and on to “The Little Theater Off Times Square,” where the pit orchestra was already playing its overture for the “opening night” of the week’s new “hit” play   The program’s elaborate two-minute opening was long, involved and convinced many that First Nighter originated from a Broadway theater and not a radio studio in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. 

First Nighter was a Friday night listening favorite throughout its first decade on Blue, NBC and CBS.  It was among Friday’s Top Ten from 1932 until 1940, twice the night’s most popular program and Number One of Friday's All Time Top Ten programs.  Campana and CBS gambled in 1940 when First Nighter was shifted to Tuesday.  The show lost 15% of its audience and dropped from the season’s Top 20, but still ranked among the night’s Top Ten.  

The show was moved back to its familiar Friday surroundings again in 1941 where it picked up a fraction of a rating point, returned to the list of  Friday’s Top Ten favorites and celebrated ten consecutive years as one of Network Radio‘s Top 50 programs.

Then Campana pushed its luck too far - it moved First Nighter to Mutual in October, 1942.  Sunday at 6:00 was considered a prime spot on Mutual - immediately following the network’s biggest hit, The Shadow, and 30 minutes NBC, CBS and Blue began their prime time schedules.  It was faulty reasoning.  First Nighter lost 40% of The Shadow’s audience, fell into single digit ratings for the first time in its history and dropped out of the season’s Top 50, never to return.  The program was moved to Mutual’s Wednesday schedule in 1943 and lost even more ground.

Campana took First Nighter off the air for the 1944-45 season until an opening became available on the nearly sold-out CBS prime time schedule in October, 1945, when it was slotted at 7:30 on Saturday.  It was among Saturday’s Top Ten but remained in single digit ratings. Campana realized that weekend scheduling for the show didn’t work and took it off the air for another year .The program was returned for a final two seasons of weeknight scheduling on CBS in 1947 and it again scored double digit ratings.  Nevertheless, Campana cancelled its longtime sponsorship. “The Little Theater Off Times Square” presented its last of over 750 original “opening night” performances on October 20, 1949.  First Nighter’s last run was an encore 17 months of repeat broadcasts for Miller Beer on NBC beginning in 1952. 

The company of actors who performed on First Nighter, Grand Hotel plus other Chicago-based programs in Network Radio’s early years included several names that later became Hollywood headliners - most notably Don Ameche and MacDonald Carey.  First Nighter alumni Les Tremayne, Olan Soule and Marvin Miller were also familiar faces in supporting film roles. 

Barbara Luddy, First Nighter’s leading lady from 1936 until the show left the air, was heard but never seen in a string of movie hits from the Walt Disney Studios.  Luddy lent her voice to the animated Lady in Lady & The Tramp, to Kanga in four of the studio’s Winnie The Poo films and to supporting characters in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood and 101 Dalmatians. 

26        FRANK MORGAN               Years Broadcast: 1937-1947       311 Points
Seasons Ranked: 9  Top 100 Seasons:  9  Top 50 Seasons:  8  Top Ten Seasons: 4
Highest Season Rank:  6th, 1938-39.              Highest Season Rating: 23.8, 1941-42.
Highest Monthly Rating:  28.9, Jan 1942.     Months Rated Number One: 0.
Programs:  Good News, (1937-39), Maxwell House Coffee Time, (1940-44), The Frank Morgan Show, (1944-45), The Kraft Music Hall, (1945-46), The Fabulous Dr. Tweedy, (1946-47).

​We're Off To Hear The Wizard.   Though it was a sideline to his heavy movie career of over a hundred films, Frank Morgan had the recognizable voice and comedic character to give him a decade of Network Radio popularity.

25        THE GREAT GILDERSLEEVE                                                             
                                                                         Years Broadcast: 1941-1957     312 Points
Seasons Ranked: 12 Top 100 Seasons: 12 Top 50 Seasons: 12 Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 14th, 1952-53.               Highest Season Rating:19.1, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 21.9, Feb 1948.        Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors:  Hal Peary, (1941-50); Willard Waterman, (1950-57).

The Super Spin. One of Wednesday's All Time Top Ten shows, this was the most successful of all Network Radio spinoffs and it successfully changed its lead actor at the height of its popularity.  Hal Peary had introduced the radio role created as Fibber McGee's blustery neighbor, then cemented it with five films as a supporting character named Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, from 1940 through 1942. The popularity of The Great Gildersleeve radio show elevated the character’s to title status with Peary in the starring role for another four RKO films in an 18 month span beginning in January, 1943. He left The Great Gildersleeve role and NBC in 1949,  lured to CBS and a new sitcom, The Hal Peary Show, which only lasted 39 weeks. 

Willard Waterman, who looked and sounded like Peary, took over the Gildersleeve role in 1950.  He also starred in the television adaptation of The Great Gildersleeve for the series’ 39 week run on NBC-TV role in 1955-56.  That opened the door to Waterman’s extensive film and television career, which like Peary’s was primarily in supporting roles until 1973.  

24       THE SCREEN GUILD THEATER                                    
                                                                          Years Broadcast: 1938-1950    317 Points
Seasons Ranked: 12 Top 100 Seasons: 10  Top 50 Seasons: 10  Top Ten Seasons: 3
Highest Season Rank: 9th, 1944-45, 1945-46. Highest Season Rating: 20.6, 1944-45.. Highest Monthly Rating: 25.1, Feb 1943.        Months Rated Number One: 0.

Act Fast!  Also known as The Screen Guild Players, the half-hour adaptation of hit movies was a weekly contribution of Screen Actors Guild members who donated their talent fees to support the union's charitable efforts.  Their efforts paid off in millions of dollars and a ranking among Monday's All Time Top Ten.
  
23       THE ALDRICH FAMILY     Years Broadcast: 1939-1953      329 Points
Seasons Ranked: 12 Top 100 Seasons: 12 Top 50 Seasons: 11 Top Ten Seasons: 4
Highest Season Rank: 6th, 1941-42, 1942-43. Highest Season Rating: 26.6, 1941-42.
Highest Monthly Rating: 33.6, Feb 1942.      Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors:  Ezra Stone, (1939-42); Norman Tokar, (1942-43); Dickie Jones, (1943-44); Raymond Ives, (1944-45); Ezra Stone, (1945-52); Bobby Ellis, (1952-53).

Henry The First. Network Radio's first, and most successful "teenage" comedy, The Aldrich Family was based on Cifford Goldsmith’s play What A Life, which became the basis for a Paramount film in October, 1939, starring Jackie Cooper as Henry Aldrich.  When The Aldrich Family became a Top Ten Network Radio hit in 1941, on its way to becoming one of Friday's All Time Top Ten, Paramount followed with Life With Henry, again starring Jackie Cooper.  Both films ignored the star of the stage and radio versions, Ezra Stone, who, in his early 20's, was considered "too old" for the role.  However, he wasn't too old for service in World War II, leaving the show for three seasons for Army duty.

The Aldrich Family became an NBC-TV sitcom in 1949 and ran for four seasons all underwritten by its sole radio sponsor, General Foods.  One of the show’s directors was Ezra Stone. 

22       KAY KYSER                       Years Broadcast: 1938-1949      331 Points
Seasons Ranked: 11 Top 100 Seasons: 11 Top 50 Seasons: 10  Top Ten Seasons: 2
Highest Season Rank: 9th, 1938-39.                 Highest Season Rating: 20.5, 1942-43.
Highest Monthly Rating: 24.8, Jan 1943.        Months Rated Number One: 0

"Evenin' Folks, How Y'All?" Kay Kyser couldn't read music or play a musical instrument.  He was simply a born showman who led remnants from Hal Kemp's University of North Carolina  Carolina Club Orchestra into becoming the most popular band of Network Radio the early 1940's and one of Wednesday's All Time Top Ten shows.  Agent Lew Wasserman took advantage of Kyser’s great popularity to negotiate a five picture contract with RKO, beginning with 1939’s That’s Right, You’re Wrong!  Kyser appeared as himself in the film which featured his band and generous roles given Harry Babbitt, Ginny Simms, Sully Mason and Merwin Bogue’s comic character, Ish Kabibble.  The gang made an encore appearance the following year with You’ll Find Out, a spoof of “haunted” mansion films, co-starring movie boogie men Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre.  Both pictures provide Kyser fans with ample samples of staged segments of NBC’s College of Musical Knowledge broadcasts, nine seasons among Wednesdays Top Ten programs and the night's Number One show from 1938 to 1941. 

21        ONE MAN’S FAMILY              Years Broadcast: 1932-1959    348 Points
Seasons Ranked: 14  Top 100 Seasons: 14  Top 50 Seasons: 12  Top Ten Seasons: 2
Highest Season Rank: 7th, 1939-40.                    Highest Season Rating: 20.3, 1939-40.
Highest Monthly Rating: 28.4, Jan 1940.          Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actor: J. Anthony Smythe.  Supporting Actors: Minetta Ellen, Michael Reffatto Bernice Belwin, Barton Yarborough, Kathleen Wilson, Page Gilman.

The Barbours By The Bay.  Few Network Radio programs can compare to Carleton E. Morse's 27 year run with his Barbour family of San Francisco's Sea Cliff neighborhood: father Henry Barbour. wife Fanny and children Paul, Hazel, twins Clauda & Clifford, and Jack.  The prolific Morse wrote every installment of the family saga then directed every episode.  In May, 1933, One Man's Family, then originating from NBC's KPO/San Francisco, became the first West Coast program to be broadcast nationwide and in time one of Sunday's All Time Top Ten.

​20        LOWELL THOMAS                 Years Broadcast: 1930-1976      353 Points
Seasons Ranked: 21 Top 100 Seasons:  20 Top 50 Seasons: 15  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 19th, 1933-34, 38-39, 41-42. Highest Sea Rating: 21.0, 1933-34.
Highest Monthly Rating: 25.0, Mar 1935.        Months Rated Number One: 0.

"So Long Until Tomorrow...and Tomorrow...and..."  Newscaster Lowell Thomas claimed the greatest longevity of any Network Radio personality - appearing most every weeknight from September 29, 1930  to May 14, 1976.  He also was seen and heard in one of the first radio/television simulcasts, appearing for his sponsor, Sun Oil on the Blue Network and WNBT-TV/New York City on July 1,1941. 

Few voices were more widely heard during the 1930's and '40's than Lowell Thomas.  His 15 minute newscasts scored 19 Top 50 seasons between 1932 and 1947 - six seasons the Multiple Runs' most popular program, easily Number One of Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten. In addition, Thomas narrated over 1,500 Fox Movietone newsreels during this period plus several dozen of Universal’s Going Places travelogues and a handful of feature films - but the trim, handsome newscaster was seldom seen on movie screens.  

His most dramatic film appearance was in the 15 minute introductory scene of 1952’s This Is Cinerama, the first in a series of films that were simultaneously photographed by three cameras to simulate the human field of vision and subsequently projected from three synchronized projectors to an ultra-wide, deeply curved screen.  The process, which also introduced stereophonic sound to movies,  required extensive renovation of theaters in which Cinerama features were exhibited and eventually gave way to more conventional 70 mm. film production and projection.  Thomas was a major investor in the Cinerama process.

19       MAJOR BOWES’ ORIGINAL AMATEUR HOUR        
                                                                          Years Broadcast: 1935-1945    359 Points
Seasons Ranked: 11 Top 100 Seasons: 10  Top 50 Seasons:  9   Top Ten Seasons: 7
Highest Season Rank: 1st, 1935-36.              Highest Season Rating: 37.5, 1935-36.
Highest Monthly Rating: 57.9, Sep 1935.      Months Rated Number One: 12.

"Around And Around She Goes..."  Major Edward Bowes, (who took his title from former Army service), was a promoter from the word go, always referring to a wheel of fortune at the beginning of his Original Amateur Hour.  Through a twist of fate he became host of local New York City radio shows in 1925 which led to The Original Amateur Hour on WHN in 1934.  He took the show to NBC in March, 1935 and it became Network Radio's Number One program in 1935-36.  Bowes jumped to CBS in 1936 and ran off another five consecutive Top Ten seasons achieving a ranking among Thursday's All Time Top Ten shows in the process.   

Bowes and selected acts from his programs appeared in a number of RKO short subjects in the late 1930’s that depicted the radio show.  Many from the series have disappeared, although the 1935 two-reel short, Major Bowes’ Amateur Theater of The Air is still available.  It features a 20 year old winner from the radio series, Frank Sinatra. 

18        BIG TOWN                                  Years Broadcast: 1937-1952   370 Points
Seasons Ranked: 14  Top 100 Seasons: 14  Top 50 Seasons: 13  Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 13th, 1940-41.             Highest Season Rating: 19.5, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 24.6, Feb 1948.        Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actors: Edward G Robinson & Claire Trevor, (1937-40); Edward G Robinson & Ona Munson, (1940-42); Ed Pawley & Fran Carlon, (1944-51); Walter Greaza & Fran Carlon, (1951-52).

Same Newspaper, Two Editions. Newspaper drama Big Town was a rare success - one of Tuesday's All Time Top Ten - that was a Top 50 show for its first five seasons, left the air for a year, then returned with a new cast and after one season, and regained its Top 50 status for its remaining eight seasons over CBS and NBC .  

17        RED SKELTON                       Years Broadcast: 1938-1953    386 Points 
Seasons Ranked: 13  Top 100 Seasons: 13 Top 50 Seasons:10 Top Ten Seasons: 6
Highest Season Rank: 1st, 1942-43.                   Highest Season Rating: 32.3, 1942-43. 
Highest Monthly Rating: 40.5, Jan 1943.         Months Rated Number One: 7.

"Goodnight And God Bless."  Indiana born Richard Skelton was the son of an itinerant circus clown who died before the youngster was born in 1906 or 1913 - even the year is questionable.  What is known, however, is that teenager Red Skelton left his home and schooling to join small-time vaudeville and showboat troupes to develop slapstick and monologue routines that would serve him for years.  In 1931 he met and married Edith Stillwell, a small town theater cashier who became his early stage partner, his first writer and his longtime business manager.  It was Stillwell who developed his breakthrough Dunking Doughnuts routine that led to his first film appearance in RKO's light comedy, Having A Wonderful Time, in 1938. 

Because he was primarily an old-school, visual, slapstick comedian, Skelton paid little attention to radio until early 1939 when he and country singer Red Foley were teamed by Brown & Williamson Tobacco's Avalon cigarettes to co-star in its weekly Avalon Time on NBC.  The show didn't crack the Annual Top 50 over two seasons, but the cigarette maker knew it had a future star on its hands and signed Red for a Tuesday night show on NBC following the ratings giants, Fibber McGee & Molly and Bob Hope.  Red Skelton's new Raleigh Cigarette Program co-starring the husband and wife musical team of Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard, debuted on October 7, 1941 and ran off three consecutive Top Five seasons, tying Hope for America's Number One show in 1942-43.  He entered the Army in 1943 and after a year's absence returned to NBC's Tuesday night lineup and picked off where he left off with another three top rated seasons, become one of Tuesday's All Time Top Ten attractions.

Red Skelton was a double-barreled hit during the 1940’s with his tremendous output of 18 MGM films and a weekly radio series.  The feat is even more impressive considering that the comedian’s career was shortened by 18 months of military service during the decade when his popularity was at its peak. 
​
After Red’s movie career had a stumbling start in RKO’s mediocre Having A Wonderful Time in 1938, he appeared in several Warner Brothers Vitaphone shorts before Mickey Rooney used his influence with MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer to sign Skelton.   

The clowning comedian paid his dues at the studio with comic relief roles in seven B pictures, including two each in MGM’s Dr. Kildare and Maisie series.  In the midst of this schedule Skelton was given his big break, the lead in what was considered a throwaway mystery comedy, Whistling In The Dark, in which he played The Fox, a stumbling radio detective. 
   
Skelton’s mugging and pratfalls drew impressive reviews and even more impressive box office results.  Movie fans wrote that they wanted to see more of The Fox.  Two sequels followed in the next two years - Whistling In Dixie and Whistling In Brooklyn - while Skelton was also given the leads in MGM’s I Dood It and the first in his string of Technicolor musicals, DuBarry Was A Lady, co-starring Lucille Ball and Gene Kelly.  

When Skelton’s Network Radio career was ascending to its ratings height from 1941 through 1944, he appeared in twelve pictures for MGM.  His schedule eased when he returned from military service but critics generally agree that his best  film work is seen in 1948’s The Fuller Brush Man - made on MGM’s loan of its star comic to Columbia Pictures - and the 1949 musical comedy Neptune’s Daughter, in which he and Betty Garrett perform the Academy Award winning song, Baby, It’s Cold Outside.

Red Skelton starred in another eleven MGM films from 1950 until 1954 when he left the studio to concentrate on his television shows.  He left behind a collection of films which comedy fans still relish.  His father, the clown, would have been proud.

16        PHIL BAKER                                      Years Broadcast: 1932-1951    415 Points
Seasons Ranked: 14  Top 100 Seasons: 14  Top 50 Seasons: 12 Top Ten Seasons: 1
Highest Season Rank: 9th, 1936-37.                     Highest Season Rating: 23.9, 1933-34.
Highest Monthly Rating: 29.5, Mar 1934.          Months Rated Number One: 0.
Programs Hosted:  The Armour Jester , (1932-35), Gulf Headliners, (1935-38), Honolulu Bound, (1938-39), The Phil Baker Show, (1939-40), Take It Or Leave It, (1941-47), Everybody Wins, (1947-48), The $64 Question, (1950-51).  

Squeezing Out Laughs With An Accordion. For 20 years, accordion-playing Phil Baker was the most taken-for granted-host in Network Radio.  Overlooked by many critics and historians were the comedian's contributions to important shows that spanned the first two decades of the Golden Age. Most notably was Gulf Headliners, which Baker took over after the sudden death of Will Rogers in 1935, and led to three Top 20 Ten seasons - one in the Annual Top Ten.  

Most Network Radio fans know Phil Baker from Take It Or Leave It, the Sunday night quiz show that introduced comedy into its contestant interviews and tension with its double or nothing format introduced by Bob Hawk in NBC in 1939.  When Hawk left the show in the middle of the 1941-42 season, Baker was called in and led it to five consecutive Top 20 seasons, fueling his momentum to joining Sunday's All Time Top Ten.

Baker starred as himself in two films from 20th Century Fox, The Gang's All Here, a musical starring Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda and the Benny Goodman orchestra released on Christmas Eve, 1943,  and Take It or Leave It, loosely based on the radio show, six months later.  

15        FANNY BRICE                        Years Broadcast: 1932-1951    437 Points
Seasons Ranked: 16 Top 100 Seasons: 16  Top 50 Seasons: 14 Top Ten Seasons: 4
Highest Season Rank: 6th, 1938-39.              Highest Season Rating: 23.8, 1941-42.
Highest Monthly Rating: 28.9, Jan 1942.       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Programs:  The Fanny Brice & George Olson Show, (1932-33), The Ziegfeld Follies of The Air, (1935-36), Revue de Paree, (1936-37),  Good News, (1937-40), Maxwell House Coffee Time, (1940-44), The Baby Snooks Show, (1944-48 & 1949-51).

​She Found A Million Dollar Baby...  Fanny Brice's alter ego, Baby Snooks, ranked second only to Edgar Bergen's Charlie McCarthy as Network Radio's favorite brat.  She contributed to Thursday's All Time Top Ten with her performances in Good News and Maxwell House Coffee Time.  

14       MR DISTRICT ATTORNEY  Years Broadcast: 1938-1952   438 Points
Seasons Ranked: 13   Top 100 Seasons: 13  Top 50 Seasons: 12  Top Ten Seasons: 3
Highest Season Rank: 8th,1943-44, 1944-45. Highest Season Rating: 21.7, 1942-43.
Highest Monthly Rating: 26.8, Jan 1943.         Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Actor:  Jay Jostyn.  Supporting Players:  Vicki Vola, Len Doyle.

Call Me Mister.  Mr. District Attorney was Network Radio’s highest rated drama with continuing characters and led Wednesday's All Time Top Ten list.   Series producer Ed Byron also crated the infamous first giveaway show, Pot O Gold.

13        YOUR HIT PARADE             Years Broadcast: 1934-1953   462 Points
​Seasons Ranked: 19  Top 100 Seasons: 19  Top 50 Seasons: 17 Top Ten Seasons: 0
Highest Season Rank: 15th, 1947-48.            Highest Season Rating: 20.0, 1947-48.
Highest Monthly Rating: 24.5, Mar 1948.       Months Rated Number One: 0.
Lead Singers: GoGo DeLys & Kay Thompson, (1934-36) 
Buddy Clark, (1936-38) 
Buddy Clark & Lanny Ross, (1938-39)
Lanny Ross, Barry Wood, Bea Wain & Bonnie Baker, (1939-40)
Barry Wood & Bea Wain, (1940-41)
Barry Wood, Louise King & Joan Edwards, (1941-42) 
Barry Wood, Frank Sinatra & Joan Edwards, (1942-43)
Frank Sinatra, Bea Wain & Joan Edwards, (1943-44)
Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Tibbett & Joan Edwards, (1944-45)
Dick Todd & Joan Edwards, (1945-46)
Andy Russell, Joan Edwards & Ginny Simms, (1946-47)
Frank Sinatra & Beryl Davis, (1947-48)
Frank Sinatra, Beryl Davis & Eileen Wilson, (1948-49)
Eileen Wilson, Bill Harrington & Jeff Clark, (1949-50)
Eileen Wilson & Snooky Lanson, (1950-51). 
Host:  Guy Lombardo, (1951-53).

Smokes Go Up In Hits. Number One of Saturday's All Time Top Ten programs, Your Hit Parade was the highest rated music show on Network Radio.  Over its 19 seasons on the air, it scored 20 times in the Top 50 - due to weekly Top 50 performances on both CBS and NBC in 1936-37 and 1937-38. 

This was all the result of flamboyant and autocratic American Tobacco chief George Washington Hill, who was among the first to realize that radio could sell his Lucky Strike cigarettes and he wasn’t afraid to use it.  Hill was one of NBC’s early sponsors with Saturday night’s hour long Lucky Strike Dance Orchestra broadcasts in 1928.  After a three year run the program was replaced in 1931 with Lucky Strike Dance Bands hosted by glib Walter O’Keefe and gossipy Walter  Winchell. The Lucky Strike Hour followed in 1933, again starring O’Keefe.  Both were Top Ten shows.  But the shrewd Hill was continually looking for something better to increase his cigarette brand‘s market share among women - the group he first targeted with the 1920‘s slogan, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”  

Armed with research indicating that women, particularly young women, were the biggest fans of popular music and most responsible for driving its sales, Hill and his Lord & Thomas ad agency created Your Hit Parade. The new program made a competition of popular music - ranking and presenting each week’s top hit songs through the use of a confidential survey that tracked record and sheet music sales plus dance band and radio requests. 

Your Hit Parade debuted on Saturday, April 20, 1935, on NBC - but not in the dramatic, fanfare accompanied, competitive form that made it a Saturday night institution.  Over its first two seasons the program presented the 15 most popular songs of the week in a bland format that sounded much like Frank & Anne Hummert’s Manhattan Merry Go Round which predated Your Hit Parade by two seasons and also purported to base its music on popularity surveys. 

That all changed in the spring of 1936, when Hill authorized the most overwhelming promotional blitz for a program and product that was ever experienced in Network Radio.  It began on April 1st when American Tobacco bought an additional hour for Your Hit Parade on NBC’s Wednesday schedule.  A month later Your Hit Parade took on a new, more modern sound starring popular young baritone Buddy Clark and Freddie Rich’s swing band.  The countdown to the top three songs of the week became the show’s highlight.  In June, American Tobacco moved the Saturday version of Your Hit Parade from NBC to CBS and bought the entire Blue Network to simulcast NBC’s Wednesday show,  The moves gave the program an hour of prime time exposure on all three major networks every week.
 
Then The Lucky Strike Sweepstakes was introduced on Your Hit Parade: Offering a carton of Lucky Strikes to anyone who could correctly predict a week’s Top Three songs in order.  The contest drew overwhelming response. 

Time magazine reported in August that the massive promotion had drawn over 6.5 Million entries during one week that resulted in the giveaway of 2,150 cartons of Lucky Strikes containing 430,000 cigarettes.  Hill considered American Tobacco’s huge expense in the promotion to be an investment in both his product and his radio show.  As usual, the crafty marketing genius was right.     

Your Hit Parade became exclusive to CBS in the fall of 1938 and remained on the network’s Saturday night schedule for eight and a half years until American Tobacco moved it to NBC midway in the 1946-47 season where it remained among Saturday’s Top Ten programs until 1951.  It never failed to finish among Saturday’s Top Ten programs for 17 consecutive seasons.    

Republic Pictures - best known for its mass production of low budgeted, but highly profitable Westerns - had a lock on the Hit Parade title.  The studio produced a string of five B-grade musicals incorporating the name from 1936 until 1951.  The first was Hit Parade of 1937 starring Frances Langford and Phil Regan.  From radio it borrowed Al Pearce plus Pick Moran and Pat Padgett.  For music, the film featured the popular bands of Duke Ellington and Eddy Duchin.  Hit Parade of 1941 followed, again with Langford in its lead.  Kenny Baker, Jack Benny’s singer/stooge for several years, provided her love interest. The film also featured Ann Miller and Phil Silvers, both destined to stardom with other studios.  Two years later Hit Parade of 1943 was released co-starring Republic’s multi-talented leading man, John Carroll, and a young Susan Hayward with Eve Arden and Count Basie’s band. 

The only star from the radio show ever to appear in the movie series was Joan Edwards in Hit Parade of 1947.   The film paired her with popular Eddie Albert and the unusual musical combination of Roy Rogers and the Sons of The Pioneers plus Woody Herman’s swing band.  Last in Republic’s productions was Hit Parade of 1951, again starring Carroll but with little music support except that provided by The Firehouse Five Plus Two Dixieland group. 
​
12        RUDY VALLEE                         Years Broadcast: 1929-1955   503 Points
Seasons Ranked: 14  Top 100 Seasons: 14  Top 50 Seasons: 13  Top Ten Seasons: 6
Highest Season Rank: 3rd, 1933-34, 1935-36. Highest Season Rating: 39.8, 1933-34.. Highest Monthly Rating: 44.8, Jan 1934.        Months Rated Number One: 3.

"My Time Is Your Time"  Hubert Prior Vallee, who took his name Rudy from his idol, saxophone virtuoso Rudy Wiedoeft, debuted for Standard Brands' Fleischmann Yeast on NBC's Thursday night schedule on  October 24, 1929.  It was Network Radio's first coast to coast, hour-long variety show.

By the dawn of Network Radio's Golden Age in 1932, Vallee was broadcasting's highest paid weekly performer, introducing a string of newcomers to radio - Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, Alice Faye, Red Skelton, Joe Penner, Frances Langford, Bob Burns and Abbott & Costello.  The wavy-haired, crooning bandleader hosted the Standard Brands show for a remarkable ten year run and six consecutive Top Ten seasons until its final broadcast on September 28, 1939.  It was enough to cement his position among Thursday's All Time Top Ten personalities.

Sealtest Dairies picked up Vallee's contract in 1939 and sponsored The Rudy Vallee Show - also on NBC's Thursday night schedule - for the next four seasons, all in the Top 25 and two in the Top 15.  The 42 year old Vallee surprised everyone in 1943 when he enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard to direct its uniformed band.  Returning to civilian life and Network Radio in the fall of 1944, Vallee was signed by Procter & Gamble to host its weekly Villa Vallee with co-star/stooge Monty Woolley.  But he found his ratings slipping as he attempted to transition from singing host to singing comedian.

That was a path Rudy Vallee followed with persistence to success in films.  After his initial movie as a romantic lead, 1929's RKO release, The Vagabond Lover, was dismissed by critics, he went to work and made an actor of himself, beginning with a number of two-reel and B-grade musicals, temporarily peaking with 1941's Palm Beach Story, which began his string of comic characterizations in major features of rich, stuffed-shirts.  Those were climaxed with his memorable role as J.B. Biggley in the 1961 Broadway musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, repeated in the 1967 United Artists film.

Rudy Vallee was notoriously thrifty and had become wealthy over his half-century in show business.  Nevertheless, he insisted on working sporadically in television until 1984, two years before his death from cancer in the arms of his wife at age 84.
​
11        FRED ALLEN                            Years Broadcast: 1932-1949    552 Points
Seasons Ranked: 16  Top 100 Seasons: 16  Top 50 Seasons: 16  Top Ten Seasons: 7
Highest Season Rank: 4th, 1946-47.              Highest Season Rating: 29.7, 1933-34.
Highest Monthly Rating: 37.6, Jun 1935.       Months Rated Number One: 0.

​He Couldn't Have Cared Less More.  Fred Allen, (fka John Florence Sullivan), was an early critic of Network Radio, dismissing it as a simplistic medium.  Yet, he painstakingly edited every word of his weekly programs. He was also a proponent of pushing the confining envelope of network censorship and sponsor sensitivity with clever scripts that were often considered, "...too smart for the room," by admiring, pseudo-sophisticated critics.  But Allen proved them wrong.  He one of those rare personalities who was among the All Time Top Ten attractions on two nights a week.  He was among Wednesday's All Time Top Ten thanks to his four hit seasons hosting NBC's Town Hall Tonight for Bristol Myers in the 1930's.  He joined Sunday's All Time Top Ten - along with his sparring partner, Jack Benny - with three Top Ten seasons for NBC and Standard Brands in the late 1940's.   

It's not that his four seasons on CBS for Texaco in the early 1940's were any slouches - they all hovered around the Top 25 - but they were low enough to give Allen's nerves a strain that forced his doctors to order him off the air for the 1944-45 season.  He found this way to explain the problem: “The next time you see a radio comedian gray before his time, his cheeks sunken and his step halt, please understand that he isn’t dying.  His wife hasn’t left him.  His children aren’t sick.  He isn’t going bankrupt.  He’s been caught with his Hooperating down, that’s all.” 

True to his workaholic nature, Fred Allen spent his "restful" season away from the air by writing and starring in the film, It's In The Bag, (adapted from Petrov's The Twelve Chairs), which was one large, inside joke co-starring his fellow NBC personalities Jack Benny, Don Ameche, William Bendix, Rudy Vallee, Jerry Colonna, Victor Moore, Minerva Pious and Harry Von Zell.   The hilarious scene involving the two comedians known for their "feud" is posted at Mr. Allen Meets Mr. Benny. 

Fred Allen left Network Radio after the tumultuous 1948-49 season, (See Stop The Music!)  Although he was known for his disdain of television, he made several attempts at TV game shows and finished out his career on the panel of What's My Line? from 1954 to 1956.  The Boston-born Irishman collapsed and died at age 61 while taking an evening walk along a New York street on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1956.

10      GEORGE BURNS & GRACIE ALLEN                             
                                                                          Years Broadcast: 1932-1950   574 Points
Seasons Ranked: 18  Top 100 Seasons: 18  Top 50 Seasons: 18 Top Ten Seasons: 5
Highest Season Rank: 5th, 1936-37.              Highest Season Rating: 28.2, 1933-34.
Highest Monthly Rating: 33.3, Apr 1933.        Months Rated Number One: 0.

Radio's Paripatetic Pair.  If their good friend Jack Benny was any example, Burns & Allen could have done much better than they did in the annual and final rankings if their shows had remained on the same night and time of broadcast over their 18  seasons in Network Radio.  Instead, they jumped between CBS and NBC six times, were heard on five different nights of the week and in ten separate timeslots.  

Nevertheless, they racked up five Top Five seasons in the 1930's - four on CBS and one on NBC. And financially they weren’t hurting. Time magazine reported midway in their debut 1932-33 season that their weekly radio income was $2,000.  Combined with their movie and personal appearance fees, their annual take in the depths of the Great Depression was over $250,000. By 1940, their weekly income from radio alone was estimated at $9,000.  This was for a couple who first teamed in 1923 vaudeville for ten dollars a show when George Burns, (fka Nat Birnbaum), was a singing comic and Gracie Allen was his dancing straight girl.  They promptly switched roles and by 1926 when they were married, straight man Burns and his ditzy partner Gracie were on their way to stardom that translated to radio and films. 

By the time they began their first radio season in 1932, Burns & Allen already had appeared in nine, one and two reel comedies for Warner Brothers and Paramount, dating back to 1929.  Their first feature film, Paramount's The Big Broadcast, released in October of 1932, teamed them with fellow CBS stars Bing Crosby, Kate Smith, The Mills Brothers and The Boswell Sisters.   Another three shorts and seven features followed until their next major films, The Big Broadcast of 1936  with Crosby, The Big Broadcast of 1937 with Jack Benny and 1938's College Swing with Bob Hope. 

Gracie began to stand out as a solo act in 1939's MGM release, Honolulu, performing a number with the studio's dancing queen, Eleanor Powell.  She followed that with two mystery-comedies, The Gracie Allen Murder Case and an early adaptation of Mr. & Mrs. North.  MGM's musical comedy, Two Girls and A Sailor, in 1944 was her final film.  

Given a new long-term contract to jump to CBS in 1949, George & Gracie abandoned radio for television in October, 1950.  Again, had they remained in radio during the final three years of the Golden Age, it’s likely that they would have moved up in the Final 50 rankings.  But they thrived in their new medium of sitcom television until 1958 when Gracie's health forced her retirement.  She died in 1964 at the age of 69.

Meanwhile, Honolulu was George Burns' last movie performance until 1975's Sunshine Boys, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor,  His Oscar led to  his best remembered role as Oh, God! in 1977 plus another eight feature films until 1994's Radioland Murders.   George Burns defied age, living two months beyond his 100th birthday in 1996 before succumbing to heart disease.  His remains are interred beside his beloved Gracie's in a Forest Lawn mausoleum marked: Gracie Allen & George Burns - Together Again.  It was his idea, insisting that she finally receive first billing.​

9        EDDIE CANTOR                       Years Broadcast: 1931-1949    595 Points
Seasons Ranked: 18  Top 100 Seasons: 18 Top 50 Seasons: 16  Top Ten Seasons: 6
Highest Season Rank: 1st, (3), 1932 thru 1935   Highest Season Rating: 55.7, 1932-33. Highest Monthly Rating: 60.9, Mar 1933.        Months Rated Number One: 15.

Banjo Eyes.  Eddie Cantor's debut season on Network Radio set several records that were never broken.  His 1932-33 season ratings average for NBC's Sunday night Chase & Sanborn Coffee Hour - as estimated by Crossley's CAB polling - was a huge 55.7.  His one month ratings for March of that season was an unbelievable 60.9.  The enormity of those ratings were among the factors that led the founding of Crossley's first competitor, Clark-Hooper, Inc., in 1934.  (See Radio's Rulers: Crossley, Hooper & NIelsen.)

​Cantor's three consecutive Number One seasons from 1932 to 1935 was a record that stood until Bob Hope broke it from 1942 to 1947.  The 5'8" and always energetic Cantor's ratings peaked in the 1930's with six Top Ten seasons and cemented his place in Sunday's All Time Top Ten.  His NBC shows for Bristol-Myers in the 1940's earned him a second distinction among Wednesday's All Time Top Ten attractions.  

Nevertheless, had he not jumped from NBC to CBS from 1934 to 1939 and hopped around six nights and seven broadcast times in his 18 seasons on the air, Cantor's ranking in the All Time Top 100 would probably have edged higher.

Billed as The Apostle of Pep, Eddie Cantor lost a fortune in the 1929 Depression but earned another fortune with his string of successful movies for Samuel Goldwyn in the 1930's: Palmy Days, The Kid From Spain, Roman Scandals, Kid Millions and Strike Me Pink.  Those successes plus his continually increasing income from Network Radio put the devoted husband of his wife, Ida, since 1914 and father of four daughters back on Easy Street - although he became far more cautious with his finances.  

8        BOB HOPE                                  Years Broadcast:  1935-1955    611 Points
Seasons Ranked: 17 Top 100 Seasons: 16  Top 50 Seasons: 16  Top Ten Seasons: 11
Highest Season Rank: 1st, (5), 1942 thru 1947 Highest Season Rating: 32.3, 1942-43.
Highest Monthly Rating: 38.9, Jan 1943.      Months Rated Number One: 31.

Winning By A Nose.  Bob Hope's first venture into series radio was Emerson Drug's 13-week Intimate Review for Bromo-Seltzer on Friday, January, 1935, over the Blue Network.  The half-hour variety show featuring singers Jane Froman and James Melton with Al Goodman's orchestra and Hope as host was met with listener indifference resulting in a 4.1 rating and 115th in the season's popularity chart.  Nevertheless, his popularity with movie audiences was gaining momentum with a string of eight two-reel musical comedies for Warner Brothers over three years beginning in 1934.  

The 1935-36 season was better when Hope moved to CBS to emcee Atlantic Oil's weekly Atlantic Family with tenor Frank Parker, Red Nichols' Five Pennies Dixieland group and the comedian's first stooge, southern-accented blonde, Patricia (Honeychile) Wilder.  The show provided Hope with his first Top 50 season of what would be his collection of 16 between 1935 and 1953.  After a 13-week summer series on Blue, 1937's Rippling Rhythm Revue, and an even shorter run on NBC's Your Hollywood Parade in early 1938, Bob Hope's film career took off like a rocket in April with the release of his first feature film, Paramount's Big Broadcast of 1938, when he and Shirley Ross introduced the Academy Award winning Thanks For The Memory, which would become his lifelong theme song.    

Boosted by the release of three more Paramount films in 1938 - College Swing, Give Me A Sailor and Thanks For The Memory - Hope got the break he needed in radio on September 27, 1938, when he introduced The Pepsodent Show on NBC with stooge Jerry Colonna, teenage singer Judy Garland and Skinnay Ennis' orchestra.  The Tuesday night variety show on was an immediate hit,  finishing the season ranked in twelfth place among all prime time programs and beginning a ten year association with the toothpaste. 

Things only got better from there for Hope as his film and radio popularity complimented each other and grew together.  He was Paramount's leading comedy star for over a decade as his series of Road pictures with Bing Crosby became classics and he introduced another Academy Award winning song, Buttons & Bows, ​in his 1948 film, The Paleface.  Hope's radio success was equally outstanding, resulting in eleven consecutive seasons in the Annual Top Ten and becoming Network Radio's Number One attraction for five straight seasons, from 1942-43 to 1946-47.  When radio popularity gave way to television in the late 1940's Hope again became a favorite, hosting his own top rated variety hours and the annual Academy Award telecasts for 19 years.

It's no coincidence that British-born Leslie Townes Hope peaked in his radio popularity during World War II, because no entertainer traveled so far, worked so hard and entertained so many Allied troops at home and abroad as naturalized citizen Bob Hope.  His tireless efforts for service personnel both during and long after the war, resulted in many awards, including The Presidential Medal of Freedom and The Congressional Gold Medal.

Bob Hope died in July, 2003, the victim of pneumonia.  Like his friend, George Burns, his death came two months after his 100th birthday.  

7       AMOS & ANDY                           Years Broadcast: 1929-1960    677 Points
Seasons Ranked: 21 Top 100 Seasons:  21  Top 50 Seasons: 19  Top Ten Seasons: 9
Highest Season Rank: 2nd (2), 1951 thru 1953 Highest Season Rating: 29.8, 1933-34.
Highest Monthly Rating: 34.1, Sep 1933.       Months Rated Number One: 3.

They Who Laugh Last.  Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll were born ten years and 600 miles apart.  Nevertheless, Gosden & Correll teamed in the 1920’s to give Network Radio its two most enduring characters - Amos & Andy - ranked among the Multiple Runs All Time Top Ten and Sunday's All Time Top Ten.  

Both partners were bitten by the show business bug at an early age. Correll was born in Peoria, Illinois in 1890.  He developed his talents as a singing piano player through his teens and early twenties while employed as a bricklayer. Gosden was born in 1900 to wealthy parents who encouraged his early talents as a singer, dancer and dialectician on the stages in his hometown, Richmond, Virginia. 
 
The two became friends in 1919 when employed by the Joe Bren Company of Chicago which provided small town civic groups with needs to mount amateur stage plays, musicals, talent and minstrel shows -  whether it be scripts, costumes and sets, or people to direct, promote and perform in the fund raising projects.  In return, Bren collected a guaranteed advance and a good slice of the box office receipts.  Gosden and Correll each spent five years on the road for Bren as traveling producers and fill-in performers.  As a result, both were promoted to jobs at the Chicago home office in 1924. The  two bachelors agreed to save money by sharing an apartment - one that contained a piano, a key to their future success.  Most every night after work Correll would sit at the piano, Gosden would pick up his ukulele and the two would  harmonize duets of popular ballads and novelty tunes.  

They entered radio with their songs on Chicago’s WQJ in early 1925.  Ironically, WQJ, the station where Gosden & Correll frequently performed for nothing, was merged several years later with WMAQ, where they would eventually make millions as Amos & Andy. Their next moonlighting stop was WEBH, located in the Edgewater Beach Hotel on Chicago’s lakefront.  The two literally sang for their supper six nights a week when their half hour of songs and patter was broadcast from a studio adjacent to the hotel’s dining room and their “pay” was the daily Blue Plate Special.   

More importantly, Gosden & Correll’s shows were noticed by Henry Selinger, manager of the Chicago Tribune’s powerful WGN Radio.  Selinger offered the pair $250 a week to leave Bren and join WGN.  They jumped at the chance and became full-time radio performers on November 25, 1925.  The two-man act of music and jokes didn’t last long on WGN.  Vocal duets were found everywhere on the Chicago dial and within a few weeks the station decided it wanted something new and different. 

Gosden & Correll had a six month contract, so they proposed to create - Sam & Henry, a daily, ten-minute “comic strip” for radio - a serialized comedy/drama based on the misadventures of two young black men from the south who moved to Chicago seeking their fortunes.  ​The two would write the program and feature Gosden as Sam and Correll as Henry. with the two performing all of the serial’s characters in variations of the Negro dialects they had developed in Bren’s minstrel shows.

The partners stressed that the program wasn’t designed to play for cheap laughs which were increasingly common to radio.  Instead, Gosden & Correll confidently predicted that Sam & Henry could become real people in the minds of their listeners -  symbolic of the average person who experienced many of the same difficulties, frustrations and small successes - only expressed in exaggerated and often comedic form through their blackface dialects.  WGN reluctantly agreed to the concept and show began its run of almost 600 episodes at 10:10 PM on January 12, 1926.  

It also began Gosden & Correll’s daily routine over the next 16 years of their strip shows’ histories.   They’d arrive at their office during the early afternoon, Correll would sit and the typewriter, Gosden would pace the floor, and the two would  work out that night’s script - often in the voices of their characters.  The process took anywhere from one to three hours. When it was finished, they’d take a break and without rehearsal perform the program exactly as they had written it.  Within six weeks Sam & Henry was the talk of Chicago. The show’s increasing popularity led Gosden & Correll to perform blackface skits as Sam & Henry in local theaters and record Sam & Henry vignettes for Victor Records.  By the end of 1926 the Chicago Tribune had created a Sunday newspaper comic strip based on the radio show.  

WGN’s transmitting power in 1927 was 25,000 watts which covered a wide area of the Midwest.  But dozens of stations outside WGN’s signal reach wanted to share in Sam & Henry’s appeal to listeners and advertisers.  In response, Gosden & Correll proposed to syndicate their program on disc to these stations.  With a bull-headed decision that would haunt it for years, WGN flatly rejected the idea.  The station claimed exclusive rights to Sam & Henry and refused to allow the program to be broadcast anywhere else.  It seemed that Gosden & Correll had no choice in the matter -  but they did.   

They began negotiations to jump to WMAQ, owned by the Tribune’s arch rival, The Chicago Sun-Times.  Although WMAQ operated with only 1,000 watts at the time, it was about to increase to 5,000 watts which was more than enough to cover the Chicago metropolitan area.  And the station was more than willing to allow Gosden & Correll to syndicate their program and profit from the venture. Sam & Henry said goodbye to their WGN audience during the week before Christmas, 1927.  Gosden & Correll took three months off to rename their characters and reformat the serial to avoid litigation with WGN.  

Amos & Andy, reportedly known for its first five days as Jim & Charlie, was born at 10:00 p.m., Monday, March 19, 1928, on WMAQ.  Gosden’s high-pitched Amos Jones sounded just like WGN’s Sam Smith and Correll’s Andrew Hogg Brown spoke with a deep bass voice identical to Henry Johnson.   The characteristics of the two owners of the Fresh Air Taxi Company were similar, too. Amos was the thoughtful, serious, hard-working partner, while Andy was the domineering, lazy and boisterous member of the pair.  

Gosden and Correll drove themselves at a hectic pace during 1928.  While writing and performing Amos & Andy at WMAQ six nights a week, they produced and syndicated a parallel version of the show to some 40 stations and played an increasing number of theater dates.  Variety reported that by mid-summer the pair commanded $5,000 a week for a round of personal appearances at Chicago’s Balaban & Katz theater chain.  Amos & Andy was easily the most popular local radio act in America at a time when Network Radio was emerging as the country’s most powerful communications force.  

​William Benton, later a partner in the Benton & Bowles advertising agency and a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, is credited with bringing Amos & Andy to Network Radio.  In the late 1920's Benton was an employee of Chicago’s Lord & Thomas Advertising.  Among the agency’s clients was a local manufacturer of toothpaste, Pepsodent.  Benton negotiated a 52 week, $100,000 contract between his client and the two partners to put Amos & Andy on the NBC Blue Network six nights a week at 7:00 p.m.  The 15 minute serial’s debut was August 19, 1929, when Bill Hay, Gosden & Correll’s announcer since their Sam & Henry days at WGN, said quietly, “Ladies and gentlemen, Amos and Andy…” 

The show was an immediate hit on the network and reconfirmed its creators’ contention that listeners would relate to their characters.  Time magazine reviewed the reaction in early March, 1930: “So intimately concerned do their audiences become with the careers of Amos & Andy that letters arrive each day expressing hopes or fears for their enterprises, warnings, all manner of comment.”

When the first Network Radio ratings were released in 1932-33, Amos & Andy ranked Number Seven, its first of three straight Top Ten seasons and nine consecutive Top 50 seasons.   It was also the first in a run of six seasons as Number One in the Multiple Runs Top Ten and another five more in the category's Top Five.  

Amos & Andy shifted from NBC's Blue to its major Red network in the July 1935, but the show had an unexpected drop in ratings signaling a popularity decline that lingered despite a "Name Amos & Ruby's Baby" contest which drew millions of entries accompanied by Pepsodent boxtops in the fall of 1936 and an experiment converting the show to a minstrel format on Friday nights in December.  Pepsodent cancelled the program in early 1938, causing Gosden & Correll to move their weeknight show to CBS for a new sponsor, Campbell Soups.   But with World War II becoming a reality, news commentators Lowell Thomas and H.V. Kaltenborn took over the Multiple Runs category while Amos & Andy's ratings continued to slide.  Gosden, then 43 and Correll, 53, gave it up and signed off their struggling strip for the final time after 4,091 episodes on February 19, 1943. 

Much to everyone's surprise, the team re-emerged on Friday, October 8, 1943, with a self-contained half-hour sitcom for Lever Brothers on NBC which was no longer a cozy little two man quarter-hour.  Instead, Gosden & Correll were the leads of a $9,000 weekly production, featuring a stagefull of black character actors in new roles created for the new format, Jeff Alexander's orchestra and chorus and the Jubilaires quartet.   

The show immediately became Friday's most popular program, displacing Kate Smith's four year reign and its 14.6 rating for the 1943-44 season was Amos & Andy's highest in seven years.  It kept getting better for the pair, moving up the season ranking ladder from 28th to 18th in 1944-45 to 14th when Lever Brothers moved the show to NBC's powerful Tuesday night lineup in 1945-46. 

Freeman Gosden & Charlie Correll's comeback seemed complete after their 1946-47 season, finishing in Seventh place with a 22.1 rating.  But their 1947-48 Tuesday night rating of 24.1 and all-time high Third place in the Annual Top 50 rankings impressed the industry - especially Bill Paley at CBS who was armed with Prudential Insurance money to begin his talent raid on NBC comedy talent.  Amos & Andy became his first target with a unique $2.0 Million capital gains, (income tax avoidance), offer to buy the characters from Gosden & Correll and employ them as consultants and stars of their programs.

Accepting the offer led the team to CBS on Sunday nights at 7:30 for the rest of the Golden Age.  When Jack Benny jumped from NBC to CBS with his 7:00 p.m. show in 1949, things only got better for Gosden &  Correll's characters whose season's rankings advanced to Number Two in 1951-52 and 1952-53. and earned them a place in Sunday's All Time Top Ten.

6        WALTER WINCHELL               Years Broadcast: 1930-1957   691 Points
Seasons Ranked: 21 Top 100 Seasons:  21  Top 50 Seasons: 21 Top Ten Seasons: 12
Highest Season Rank: 4th (2),1944-45,1948-49 Highest Season Rating: 26.0, 1941-42.
Highest Monthly Rating: 33.1, Jan & Feb 1942. Months Rated Number One: 6.

The Enigma of The Air.  The question still remains in the half century since he left the air: Was Walter Winchell - in his shirt sleeves and cocked fedora - a newsman or an actor portraying a newsman?  Regardless, Walter Winchell was Network Radio’s big fish in a small pond - the Blue/ABC Network’s all-time ratings champ who ranked in the Annual Top Ten in 12 of the 21 seasons of Radio’s Golden Age.  Winchell’s 15 minute Sunday night rapid-fire mélange of news, gossip, rumor and sound effects was the highest rated quarter hour series in Network Radio history and the highest rated program to spend Network Radio’s Golden Age exclusively on one network.  He finally left ABC in 1955 and spent his last two years of Sunday night radio at Mutual.  

5         BING CROSBY                         Years Broadcast:  1931-1956   719 Points
Seasons Ranked: 21 Top 100 Seasons:  21  Top 50 Seasons:  20 Top Ten Seasons: 8
Highest Season Rank: 4th (2),1937-38, 1938-39 Highest Season Rating: 22.7,1937-38. Highest Monthly Rating: 30.0, Feb 1938.        Months Rated Number One: 0.

Mr. Versatility.  Bing Crosby was the most popular film and recording star of Network Radio’s Golden Age.  He’s also the highest ranked radio personality who never had a season’s - or even a month’s - Number One program.  Yet, his eleven season run on NBC’s Kraft Music Hall from 1935 to 1946 was consistently among the annual Top 15 programs, seven times in the Top Ten, including four in the Top Five.  In addition, his early programs for Chesterfield Cigarettes and Woodbury Soap, plus his encore CBS series for Chesterfield, 1949-52, and first of two final seasons for General Electric in 1952-53, kept him in the annual Top 50 ranks for 20 of the era’s 21 years.  As a result, he finished in both Wednesday's and Thursday's All Time Top Ten.

Harry Lillis Crosby was 28 when CBS introduced 15 Minutes With Bing Crosby on September 2, 1931.  By the time of his final broadcast, again a nightly quarter-hour on CBS on December 28, 1956, he had become Network Radio's most popular singer - yet one who nonchalantly ignored all of the accepted rules achieving that rank.  

He could afford the risk in radio because he had become a major motion picture star, capping his early simple musical comedies of the 1930's and Road pictures with Bob Hope by winning an Academy Award as Best Actor and introducing four Oscar winning songs in his films: Sweet Leilani, (1937); White Christmas, (1942); Swingin' On A Star, (1944), and In The Cool, Cool, Cool of The Evening, (1951).  Those songs, plus scores of others, produced yet another career that sold hundreds of millions of budget priced Decca Records from which Crosby received a few cents royalty from each disc sold.

In September, 1931, the same month that Crosby debuted on CBS, the first of his eight two-reel shorts produced by Mack Sennett, I Surrender Dear, was released.  He was paid $600 for the job. The film’s success earned him a raise to $750 per picture and a new Crosby short appeared every two months.

Crosby’s first starring feature, 1932’s The Big Broadcast, initiated his first multi-picture contract with Paramount.   In total, Crosby starred in 13 shorts and features between 1932 and 1934 and his fan mail count at Paramount swelled to over 7,000 letters a week.

But Crosby's Woodbury Show on CBS was slipping in its two years pitted against Ben Bernie on NBC.  Andrew Jergens Company cancelled its Woodbury Soap program in June, 1935, and Crosby left CBS, making it clear he didn't need a network show - local stations large and small from coast to coast were giving his records all the exposure he needed.  He didn't add that his annual income had grown to almost $500,000 without radio. 
 
His next film, Anything Goes, loosely adapted from Cole Porter’s hit Broadway musical, was released by Paramount two weeks after Bing’ replaced Paul Whiteman as host of NBC’s Kraft Music Hall in January, 1936.  Crosby biographer Gary Giddens notes that Kraft heavily promoted the Crosby image in grocery stores which increased the synergy between his films, radio shows and record sales.  Further cementing the ties, Rhythm On The Range, another light-hearted musical, co-starring Bing’s radio sidekick Bob Burns, was released in July.  
​
Crosby's contract with Paramount allowed him to make a picture independent of the studio's control, so he co-produced Pennies From Heaven at Columbia in November, 1936.  It was a breakthrough film allowing him to display a serious side to his acting seldom before seen and the title song became his first to be nominated for an Academy Award.  

The familiar Paramount pattern of seven light musical comedies resumed over the next three years.  The standout of the crop was 1937’s Waikiki Wedding which again co-starred his radio chum, Bob Burns. The movie became a box office phenomenon, finishing third in the year’s domestic gross and igniting a national craze for Hawaiian themed music.  Riding the crest of the fad was the ballad Sweet Leilani, which went on to win an Academy Award, sold over 50 million units of sheet music and became Bing’s first million selling record. 

Not by coincidence, 1937-38 was also the first of two consecutive seasons that Kraft Music Hall finished in the annual Top Five programs at Number Four.  As his reward for five consecutive Top Ten seasons, Crosby’s income from the program rose to $7,500 a week in 1941. 

His remaining films of the decade were all overshadowed by 1939’s pairing of Bing and his golfing pal, Bob Hope, a comedy originally intended for Fred MacMurray and Jack Oakie who turned it down as did George Burns & Gracie Allen.  The Road To Singapore turned out to be an ad-lib and slapstick fight for the hand of beautiful Dorothy Lamour that spawned six profitable sequels for Paramount and its trio of stars. 

The nostalgic Christmas ballad that became Crosby's most popular song was casually introduced in Holiday Inn, released in August, 1942.  In the film loaded with production numbers, White Christmas was a simple duet, sung at a living room piano with Marjorie Reynolds, who lip-synced the vocal of Paramount contract actress-singer, Martha Mears.  The song went on to win the Academy Award and Bing’s performance of the Irving Berlin classic for Decca sold 50 million copies, becoming the best selling record of the era. 

Three months later, The Road To Morocco, generally considered to be the best comedy in the series, climaxed a very good year for Crosby and Kraft Music Hall settled into a comfortable run of four years in Network Radio's Top 15.  The show was cut from 60 to 30 minutes a week on Thursday, January 7, 1943, but Crosby's salary remained the same $7,500 a week.  

It’s ironic that Crosby, the romantic singer who always got the girl in his movies, scored his greatest triumph in the film where he never pursued one, 1944’s Going My Way, in which he and co-star Barry Fitzgerald played priests.  The movie was the year’s leading box office attraction and was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning seven including Best Picture.  Bing won the Oscar for Best Actor and the song he introduced in the film, Swinging On A Star,, was named Best Song.  To keep his romantic image alive Crosby wooed and won Betty Hutton in the musical comedy Here Come The Waves released six months later and Crosby was crowned box office champion for the first of five consecutive years.  His movie successes also to push Kraft Music Hall back into the Top Five in 1944-45.

Bing Crosby is remembered as the star who broke the major networks’ resistance to recorded programs in 1946.  The story began a year earlier when the 42 year old Crosby, whose nonchalant persona masked a penchant for scheduling and punctuality, saw transcribing Kraft Music Hall as a means to add flexibility to his workload which included five Paramount films between 1944 and 1946, an average of six songs recorded for Decca every month, a growing myriad of outside business interests and a heavy schedule of USO appearances.  He repeatedly proposed transcribing the Music Hall shows to Kraft and NBC but it was flatly rejected.  

In retaliation, Crosby refused to report to NBC for the 1945-46 season in October.  Kraft hired Frank Morgan to host a hastily assembled Music Hall without Bing and sued their longtime star for breach of contract.  A mediated settlement returned the singing host to The Kraft Music Hall in February, 1946, for a final 13 weeks.  On May 9th their eleven year association ended.

The question for Bing, and his brother/manager Everett, was two-fold:  Did Crosby really want to give up the weekly income and exposure that a Network Radio show provided, and what sponsor and network would permit him to record it? 

The young American Broadcasting Company, (fka NBC's Blue Network), and Philadelphia based home appliance manufacturer Philco, gave the Crosby's their answer with a three year contract paying Bing $35,000 a week to package and transcribe Philco Radio Time at his convenience for broadcast on 217 ABC affiliates and 94 independent stations Wednesday night at 10:00 p.m. for 39 weeks a season.  

Crosby's first ABC show on October 16, 1946 with guest Bob Hope was a success, returning a smash 24.0 Hooperating.  But ratings drifted steadily downward from there.  The 1947-48 season was a disaster.  Although the show moved up to 40th place in the final season of Bing‘s three year contract with ABC, Everett Crosby was actively shopping his brother‘s services to other sponsors and networks.  As he had in 1932, Everett found both in Liggett & Myers and CBS. 

The new Bing Crosby Show, recorded on tape for Chesterfield cigarettes, debuted on Wednesday, September 21, 1949, at 9:30 p.m.  With regular appearances by singer Peggy Lee and frequent guest shots by Al Jolson it scored the ratings upset of the season.  Crosby beat NBC’s established hit, Mr. District Attorney, in his time period, finishing the season as Wednesday’s Number One program and eighth in the overall rankings, his last season in the Annual Top Ten.    

Then, as Network Radio’s Golden Age drew to a close, Bing concluded his broadcasting career at CBS with three Top 30 seasons, two for Chesterfield and one for General Electric.  He closed it down with an informal weeknight quarter-hour of songs with the Buddy Cole Trio and announcer-sidekick Ken Carpenter from November, 1954, to January, 1956 - not all that different from his first short series on CBS in early 1933.   

Bing Crosby suddenly collapsed and died of a massive heart attack at age 74 on October 14, 1977, after finishing a round of golf with friends in Spain.  He wouldn't have had it any other way.   

4        FIBBER McGEE & MOLLY  Years Broadcast: 1935-1959    753 Points
Seasons Ranked: 18  Top 100 Seasons: 18  Top 50 Seasons: 17 Top Ten Seasons: 13
Highest Season Rank: 1st, 1941-42.               Highest Season Rating: 31.3, 1943-44.
Highest Monthly Rating: 38.1, Mar 1942.       Months Rated Number One: 16.
Lead Actors:  Jim & Marian Jordan.  Supporting Cast: Hal Peary, Bill Thompson, Gale Gordon, Arthur Q. Bryan, Isabel Randolph, Shirley Mitchell, Marlin Hurt, Bea Benaderet, Hugh Studebaker and others. 

Waxing Comedic: Among the mementos left to his nephew, Leo, by  Jim Jordan is a self-painted portrait of comedian Red Skelton in clown makeup.  On the back of the canvas is the handwritten inscription:  To Jim and Marian Jordan.  Thanks for everything!  Red Skelton.  ​

​Bob Hope felt the same way because it was the Jordans’ sitcom, Fibber McGee & Molly, that set the ratings table for both Hope and Skelton in NBC’s powerful Tuesday night lineup.  For five seasons, the three shows jockeyed for first, second and third place in Tuesday’s Top Ten.  On a bigger scale, the trio dominated Network Radio’s top three positions in 1942-43, 1943-44 and again in 1945-46.  

Most consistent of the three, Fibber McGee & Molly finished in second place in the Annual Top 50 over seven seasons in the 1940’s, six of them consecutive from 1943-44 to 1948-49.   A welcome exception was the 1941-42 season when the sitcom was Network Radio’s most popular program.  Overall, the sitcom set in their writer/partner Don Quinn's mythical town of Wistful Vista, scored 13 straight seasons in the Top Five.

Fibber McGee & Molly came about when Jim, then 38, and Marian, his 36 year old wife of 16 years, were performing in Quinn's Smackout, a weekday comedy from WMAQ/Chicago in 1934.  Among the program’s fans were Henrietta Johnson Louis, daughter of the president of Johnson Wax, located in nearby Racine, Wisconsin, and her husband, Jack Louis, a partner in Chicago’s Needham, Louis & Brorby Advertising, which handled the Johnson Wax account. 

The agency's meetings with Quinn and the Jordan's - now 1/3 partners in all ventures - led to The Johnson Wax Program, with Fibber McGee & Molly beginning in a 13-week trial run on Blue in April, 1935.    With favorable reviews, but scant ratings, it was moved to Blue's Monday night schedule opposite Helen Hayes on NBC and Horace Heidt on CBS.  The couple's first season rating on Blue as Fibber McGee & Molly in 1935-36 was 6.6.  It all went up from there when Johnson Wax  moved the sitcom to NBC's Monday schedule in 1936 -37.  Even against the formidable Lux Radio Theater on CBS, FM&M's growing audience responded with double-digit ratings and the show enjoyed its first of 17 straight Top 25 seasons.   Common sense finally prevailed and the show was moved on March 15, 1938 to Tuesday night at 9:30 on NBC. its home for the 16 years remaining of Network Radio's Golden Age.

The sitcom's importance to NBC's Tuesday night comedy lineup can never be discounted although it was often overshadowed by Fibber & Molly's stable mates, movie stars Bob Hope and Red Skelton.   If any proof was needed that a show's longevity in its night and time of broadcast affected its popularity, Fibber McGee & Molly provided it with 16 seasons among the the night's Top Ten shows and seven as Tuesday's highest rated program. 

Jim & Marian Jordan took their Fibber & Molly characters to the screen in a limited number of films due to Marian's marginally frail health.  The couple first appeared in the 1937 Paramount release, This Way, Please, which was cited as contributing to her November nervous breakdown and 18 months off the radio show.  On her return to the program the couple appeared in RKO'S Look Who's Laughing in 1941, Here We Go Again in 1942 - both co-starring NBC's Edgar Bergen and his Charlie McCarthy - and Heavenly Days in 1944.  But that was the extent of it.  Despite their box-office success, the Jordan's flatly refused any further offers to appear as Fibber & Molly in any more film or television adaptations.  

Radio was their medium and they remained with it long after their Tuesday night series was cancelled in June, 1953.  First they appeared in a series of recorded weeknight quarter hour on NBC from October, 1953 to March, 1956 and then in five-minute capsulized conversations on the network's weekend series, Monitor, from 1957 to 1959.

Marian's health gave out with her passing in 1961 at age 62.  Jim remarried and survived another 30 years until age 91.  Jim & Marian Jordan are interred side by side in a Culver City, California cemetery and forever remembered as Fibber McGee & Molly.

​3        EDGAR BERGEN & CHARLIE McCARTHY              
                                                                          Years Broadcast:,1937-1956   757 Points 
Seasons Ranked: 16  Top 100 Seasons: 16  Top 50 Seasons:16  Top Ten Seasons: 16
Highest Season Rank: 1st (2), 1937-38,1938-39 Highest Season Rating: 32.2, 1938-39.
Highest Monthly Rating: 40.2, Feb 1938.         Months Rated Number One: 37

Dummy Up!  Edgar Bergen was a 33 year old ventriloquist popular on the night club circuit with his dummy, Charlie McCarthy, dressed in top hat and tails, when Rudy Vallee introduced him to Network Radio on NBC's Royal Gelatin Hour on December 17, 1936. 

It's not that Bergen was a stranger to audiences, he and Charlie had starred in twelve, two-reel shorts for Warner Brothers since 1930.  Nevertheless, Bergen's debut to the unseen radio audience wasn't without a touch of trepidation. John Dunning reports in his Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio: "Vallee's introduction was hesitant, almost apologetic, asking, 'Why put a ventriloquist on the air? The answer is why  not?"  The answer became clear when Bergen's act was a hit, Vallee signed him to a 13-week contract and ratings for the show shot up 25% during the first three months of 1937. 

This all happened while Royal Gelatin's owner, Standard Brands, was wrestling with the season-long dilemma of its Sunday night hour at 8:00 on NBC, deserted in September by Major Ed Bowes who took his Original Amateur Hour to CBS.  Standard's first replacement to fill its Chase & Sanborn Hour was The Goodwill Court, offering free legal advice to listeners, then driven off the air by the New York County Lawyers Association in December and replaced by Do You Want To Be An Actor? for amateur thespians.  The hour's once high ratings had drifted into single digits by April.  However, Bergen's 13 weeks of success on Vallee's show seemed to offer be the possible solution.  (See The 1936-37 Season and The 1937-38 Season.)

Standard's ad agency, J. Walter Thompson, and NBC decided to take a chance on the ventriloquist, but taking no chances they covered their bet with a roster of co-stars.  The new Chase & Sanborn Hour with host Don Amehe, W.C. Fields, Dorothy Lamour, Edgar Bergen with Charlie McCarthy and weekly guest stars was introduced on May 9, 1937, and ran all summer to build its audience.  The strategy worked.  The following 1937-38 season was the first of two straight seasons that the Standard Brands show with 30-plus ratings was the most popular in all Network Radio.  By then it had become obvious that listeners simply wanted to hear Charlie's verbal combat with men and his obvious innuendos directed to women.  

Regarding the latter, Variety reported on May 26th: "Despite the avalanche of comment on Edgar Bergen's ventriloquism act on the air, there are many who still believe Charlie McCarthy is actually a living, 12 year old boy.  Hinterland stations carrying Bergen on the new Chase & Sanborn spread, found trickles of complaints flowing in from benighted dialers that McCarthy was talking too fresh for so young a boy to the femmes on the program."  

The show survived its infamous Mae West scandal in 1938, took its cast changes and 1939's cutback to 30 minutes in stride and continued on to score the next 14 seasons in the Annual Top Ten, twelve of them in the Top Five.  Among Sunday night's comedy competition which included Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Amos & Andy, Phil Baker and Eddie Cantor from 1936 to 1953, Edgar Bergen had the night's most popular program six times.

Edgar Bergen was  a surprisingly private person which limited his film appearances during his peak radio years.  The notable exceptions are 1939's You Can't Cheat An Honest Man with W.C. Fields and the two comedies with Jim & Marian Jordan, RKO's hits Look Who's Laughing and Here We Go Again.  He simply didn't need the additional work regardless of the income.  By 1938 the ventriloquist was earning over $100,000 annually in royalties from sales of Charlie McCarthy dolls and merchandise.  

All of this was the result of Edgar Bergen's purchase of Charlie's head, first carved by a Chicago woodworker in 1923 for $23.75 - and an abundance of priceless talent. 

​2        LUX RADIO THEATER          Years Broadcast: 1934-1955    837 Points
Seasons Ranked: 18  Top 100 Seasons: 18  Top 50 Seasons: 18 Top Ten Seasons: 17
Highest Season Rank: 1st (5), 1947 thru 1952   Highest Season Rating: 31.2, 1947-48 .
Highest Monthly Rating: 38.5, Feb 1948.       Months Rated Number One: 40.
Hosts:  John Anthony, (1934-35), Cecil B. DeMille, (1935-1945), William Keighley, (1945-52), Irving Cummings, (1952-55).

888 Nights At The Movies. No program dominated its night of broadcast or its timeslot like Lux Radio Theater did on Mondays at 9:00 p.m. for Lever Brothers and CBS. It was Monday’s most popular program for an unmatched 18 years Network Radio’s Golden Age span of 21 years.   
​ 
Lux Radio Theater - named for Lever's Lux Beauty Soap - began in October, 1934, with a season's run as a 2:30 Sunday afternoon feature from New York on the Blue network. Presenting radio adaptations of Broadway stage hits, it pulled a respectable 14.5 Crossley rating which would have placed it 40th among the season's nighttime programs.  The rating was excellent for a daytime show - but not good enough for Lever Brothers or its agency, J. Walter Thompson.  The show was assigned to JWT's Danny Danker, who at 32 had helped pioneer West Coast programming for the agency.  

Danker spearheaded key moves pushing the show's leap to success.  First was the shift to CBS on Monday nights at 9:00 beginning on July 29, 1935 beginning a string of 888 broadcasts.  The move also involved the introduction of movie adaptations to the program. Ten months later came the expensive makeovers of shifting its production from New York to Hollywood and a the exclusive focus on adaptations of current or recent motion pictures with a budget that allowed up to $5,000 for featured stars and the hiring of veteran director Cecil B. DeMille as its host for $2,000 per broadcast. 

The new format debuted on June 1, 1936 with the Lux adaptation of The Legionnaire & The Lady starring Clark Gable & Marlene Dietrich followed in the next weeks by The Thin Man with William Powell & Myrna Loy and Al Jolson & Ruby Keeler in Burlesque.  Danker's maneuvers were costly, but paid dividends when Lux Radio Theater finished the 1936-37 season in fourth place in the Annual Top Ten.  The show would never again drop out of the Top Ten, finishing in the Top Five 12 times over the next 17 seasons.

Although Cecil B. DeMille is the personality most often associated with the success of Lux Radio Theater, the host who led the show to its only first place finishes was DeMille's replacement, director William Keighley who took over in 1945.  Keighley led Lux to five consecutive seasons as Network Radio's most popular program from 1947 to 1952.  

Unfortunately, the real hero of Lux Radio Theater's success never saw it happen.  Danny Danker died in 1944 at the young age of 41. 

1          JACK BENNY                         Years Broadcast:  1932-1955     966 Points
Seasons Ranked: 21 Top 100 Seasons: 21 Top 50 Seasons:  21 Top Ten Seasons: 19
Highest Season Rank: 1st, (4), 1936-37, 1939-40, 1940-41, 1952-53. 
Highest Season Rating: 35.0, 1934-35.       Highest Monthly Rating: 42.3, Apr 1935.    Months Rated Number One: 36.

​"Well!" Well Done.  Jack Benny, (fka Benny Kubelsky), was a vaudeville headliner appearing in Earl Carroll's Vanities on March 29, 1932, when New York Daily News columnist Ed Sullivan invited him to appear on his WABC quarter-hour.  Benny's first words were a tip-off to his on-air persona that would debut in May: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Jack Benny talking.  There will be a slight pause as you say, 'Who cares?"  

As it turned out, millions of listeners did care over the next 21 seasons.  They cared for Benny and his troupe of put-down artists - his wife, a black valet figure, an Irish tenor, a boozy bandleader, a hefty announcer and numerous comic actors.  They cared enough to push his shows for General Foods and American Tobacco into the Annual Top Ten for 19 consecutive seasons, 16 of them in the Top Five.  Further, Jack Benny was the only personality to score a Number One season in all three decades of Network Radio's Golden Age.  He planted his flag on Sunday night at 7:00 and never moved it in his travels over Blue, (1934-36), NBC, (1936- 48), and CBS, (1948-55) and an encore two seasons of recorded repeats.

All the while Benny portrayed a cheap, egotistical, vain, narcissist loudmouth who was oblivious to his faults or what others thought about him.  It was the antithesis of Benny's true personality, but he played the part so well that audiences loved him for it.

Benny told New York Daily News columnist Ben Gross in 1952: "I may not be the world's greatest comedian, but I am one of its most successful performers.  And I have an explanation for this success.  In the first place, I work closely with my writers, who are good ones.  But the one factor which is more important is that I'm a damned good editor."                                                                                                                                                   
That becomes obvious when hearing Benny in GOld Time Radio posts: Sunday At Seven, Benny's Double Plays, Lucky Gets Benny, The Feud1, The Feud2, Your Money Or Your Life, and seeing him in Mr. Allen Meets Mr. Benny.   Another key factor to the program's success was entire ensemble's keen sense of timing which included silent pauses that often brought hilarious results.  

Add to this Benny's running gags built around his personality, his ancient Maxwell automobile, his sub-basement vault, his polar bear, (Carmichael), his long-suffering neighbors (the Ronald Colman's), and recurring characters played by Artie Auerbach, Bea Benaderet, Sara Berner, Joe Besser, Mel Blanc, Andy Devine, Verna Felton, Joe Kearns, Sheldon Leonard, Eddie Marr, Frank Nelson and others.   

The wide array of sidebar situations and characters provided a field day for Benny's writers, Harry Conn, (1932-36), Bill Morrow & Ed Beloin, (1937-43), and Sam Perrin, Milt Josephberg, George Balzer & John Tackaberry, (1944-55).   And of course there was the comedian himself, who admitted to being, ",,,a damned good editor." 
                                                                                                                                                  Copyright 2020.  Jim Ramsburg, Estero FL   EMail: tojimramsburg@gmail.com