George Edwards

George Edwards was born Henry Parks on March 11,1886 in Kent Town South Australia. From an early age his passion was acting and the theatre. He had the knack of mimicry and the story goes that in his early teens he was able to convince an angry neighbour to return a ball by using George's fathers' voice. 

As soon as he could he left school and spent all his time and money purchasing theatrical items such as makeup etc as well as going to the theatre. Also he joined an amateur theatrical group and was in many plays. By 18 he had made a name for himself in amateur  theatre as a mimic. However, his health "broke down" so his father booked him a passage to England. 

It was in England that he got his first professional job working for the famous impresario of British theatre, George Edwards. He did theatre all over England  as well as Music Hall, for he was also an accomplished dancer and singer. His career did not seem to reach the heights that would come later, as he moved from straight theatre, vaudeville to becoming a dancing instructor.  

It was during this period that he changed his name from Harold Parks to George Edwards at the behest of Edward Branscombe who was putting together an up market act did not want anyone who was associated with low brow music hall type acts. So Harold changed his name to the name of the famous English impresario.

The facts about this period are in question, as the biography's that are about for him were either written by George himself or his brother. Nothing bad seems to have happened. It is known that he was married twice and that his second wife died after an illness, It seems that George took this very hard and had to go to Germany to "take the waters" whether this meant, if we read between the lines, he hit the bottle is not really known. 

If we read Richards Lane's book or Sumner Locke Elliot's article in the Bulletin, which the former is in part was based upon, it would seem that in the years prior to 1931/2, George was on the skids and the story goes that he played pie nights and the Showboat a venue that was regarded as the pits for any performer. 

Around 1931, it seems, he advertised for a partner and this is where he met Nell Stirling. They became a double act. From here, his fortunes seemed to change.  In 1931 George appeared on the ABC in a Saturday variety show doing a ten minute stint . He also, with Nell, performed in department stores.

George was offered to produce a popular play at the time for 2GB, the Ghost Train. He had a budget of 70 pounds and was to provide the cast, the scriptwriter et all. At first George thought it too difficult but astute Nell saw an opportunity and agreed to do it. They hired an aspiring, but as yet untested, scriptwriter by the name of Maurice Francis and to save money Nell talked George into doing four or so roles. 

George was initially horrified, as he thought that people would see his as just a stunt to save money. He agreed on condition that what they were doing would not be mentioned. 

However, at the end of the show the announcer listed the parts that George played and the rest is history. Rather than being castigated, the public was enthralled that one person could play so many parts. Soon George had sponsors for his shows and of these there were many. 

He soon was working with 2GB and their, George and Nell's workload grew astonishingly. They had a morning show Darby and Joan, a children's session David and Dawn early evening, then a show such as Westward Ho between 6 and 7 pm, then an 8.oopm series of Inspector Scott or The Laughing Cavalier and to top things off another show around 10.00pm such as Notable British Plays.  Thus was 5 days a week. On the weekend there would be a special Darby and Joan evening version and on Sunday George and Co would do a play at 8.00pm. His popularity was not only limited to Sydney but Nationally as well. 

In the mid thirties he signed a contract with EMI Columbia at Homebush and now he had recording facilities. He also changed over to Station 2GB, where he would remain until his death. All shows were now recorded and his life eased a little, but in most of the show he produced he took many roles. 
 
In 1937 he started what many would consider to be the definitive Australian show Dad and Dave. Here George played many a part and would ply Dad until his death in 1953. By this time the George Edwards Productions held over 50000 episodes in its inventory. 
 
In the early years, say to 1942, George would be in most of his productions, after that he let up a little and took up his other interest of horses, opening his own stable, but with little success. He and Nell had a girl, Carolyn, in 1941, but the marriage was a little unsteady when in 1948 Nell and George was divorced with Nell taking over the reigns at George Edwards Productions She allowed George only one role and that was Dad in Dad and Dave which as previously mentioned he continued to play until his death. 

Frankenstein

Produced by George Edwards, Frankenstein was a radio series adapted from Mary Shelley’s novel The Modern Prometheus. The story was about Baron Victor Frankenstein, a genius yet mad scientist who thinks that he can create a living man from dead bodies. In total, 13 episodes were recorded until its end in 1932.

Shelley's original story is the inspiration for a thirteen-part 1938 serial from the branch of Transco Syndications. Karloff is featured in air trailers for Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, and House of Frankenstein, and plays the Monster opposite Santa Claus on It's Time to Smile. Suspense, The Weird Circle, and The Witch's Tale all present versions of the original story.

Mary Shelley created the book on a rainy afternoon in 1816 in Geneva, where she was staying with her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, their friend Lord Byron and Lord Byron's physician, John Polidori. The group, trapped indoors by the inclement weather, passed the time telling and writing ghost stories. The ideas for both Frankenstein, and Polidori's The Vampyre, which was published in 1819, were both born that day.

Although serving as the basis for the Western horror story and the inspiration for numerous movies in the 20th century, the book Frankenstein is much more than pop fiction. The story explores philosophical themes and challenges Romantic ideals about the beauty and goodness of nature.

Mary Shelley led a life nearly as tumultuous as the monster she created. The daughter of free-thinking philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, she lost her mother days after her birth. She clashed with her stepmother and was sent to Scotland to live with foster parents during her early teens, then eloped with the married poet Shelley when she was 17. After Shelley’s wife committed suicide in December of 1816, the couple married but spent much of their time abroad, fleeing Shelley’s creditors. Mary Shelley gave birth to five children, but only one lived to adulthood. 

Mary was only 24 years old when Shelley drowned in a sailing accident; she went on to edit two volumes of his works. Aside from her earnings from writing, she lived on a small stipend from her father-in-law, Lord Shelley, until her surviving son inherited his fortune and title in 1844. She died at the age of 53. 

Fort Laramie

 

Fort Laramie was a CBS Radio Western series with Raymond Burr as Captain Lee Quince. It aired every Sunday afternoons, from January 22 through October 28, 1956. In the series, the fort had 400 troops in all but they had to keep their eye on a nearby Indian reservation with 4,000 Sioux camped there. Major Ned Daggart led the troops and he didn't always see eye to eye with Quince. Daggart had a niece called Terrie Lawson, who had her eye on the Captain. Supporting regulars included Vic Perrin as Sgt. Gorse, Harry Bartell as the slightly green Lt. Seiberts and Jack Moyles as Major Daggett. Heard on a more irregular basis were Howard McNear as Pliny the fort sutler, Sam Edwards as Trooper Harrison, and in a variety of roles, such actors as John Dehner, John McIntire, Virginia Gregg, James Nusser, Parley Baer and Barney Phillips.

Produced and directed by Norman Macdonnell, this Western drama depicted life at old Fort Laramie during the 19th Century. The 41 episodes starred Raymond Burr as Lee Quince, captain of the cavalry. One year later, Burr became a television star as Perry Mason.

 All except star Raymond Burr had been heard on MacDonnell's other Western radio series, Gunsmoke. Amerigo Marino supplied the music. The scripts were mostly written by John Meston, Kathleen Hite, Les Crutchfield and John Dunkel.

John Dehner originally auditioned for the part of Lee Quince in a story that was later remade with Burr in the lead, called "The Boatwright's Story".

Tom Howard

Tom Howard, born Thomas Black in Ireland in 1885, came with his parents to the United States when he was a kid. In 1905 he changed his name to Tom Howard and went into vaudeville working the Columbia and American burlesque circuits.  Howard began acting in one and two reel comedy shorts in 1929.  Three years later he teamed with George Sheton in a dozen shorts for Paramount and Educational Film Corp.  Howard‘s last film appearance was with Shelton in the 1936 two-reeler, Rail Birds.  Howard and Shelton made frequent Network Radio guest shots on Rudy Vallee‘s Fleischmann Yeast Hour in the 1930‘s but Tom was 57 in 1942 and his career was seemingly over.  

Howard welcomed his daughter’s idea, spiked up her scripts with a few gags from his burlesque days and suggested that a new name was needed.  The most immediate need, however, was finding the cast to accurately portray the degree of intellectual inferiority that the script required.  He picked up the phone and called three old friends.

In 1905, he embarked on his show business career, taking the stage name Tom Howard. After decades of working in medicine shows, burlesque, vaudeville and a few Broadway plays, he made his breakthrough in two Broadway musicals, Rain or Shine (1928) and Flo Ziegfeld's Smiles (1930), the latter at a salary of $1100 a week. He appeared in two feature films, Rain or Shine (1930, repeating his stage role) and Get That Venus (1933).

Howard became better known in movie short subjects, filmed in New York by Paramount and then Educational. Many of these featured Howard's longtime burlesque and vaudeville partner George Shelton (1885–1971).

Howard owned, co-wrote, and starred in the radio comedy show It Pays to Be Ignorant, which aired from 1942 to 1951, first on the Mutual Broadcasting System, then CBS, and finally NBC. 

Howard died of a heart ailment in Long Branch, New Jersey at the age of 69, in 1955.

It Pays to Be Ignorant

It Pays to Be Ignorant was broadcast from September 1973 to the beginning of 1974. It was a remake of the earlier radio and short lived television show. In 1973, the show was syndicated by Hatos-Hall Productions and shown as a weekly series with Joe Flynn as the host and Jo Anne Worley, Billy Baxter and Charles Nelson Reilly as panelists. The announcer was Jay Stewart. It featured dumb questions like "Who wrote Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens?" and "What river goes through Mississippi and has the same name?" The panelists fumble at trying to answer the question and never succeed. The questions are selected by a descending dunce cap and when time is up, a cuckoo bird sound is heard. The contestant who selects the question is usually given a dumb prize like a "do it yourself kit". When Billy Baxter asks what the contestant will do with a "do it yourself kit", Joe Flynn drily answers "Why would you care? She's going to do it herself". Does anyone know where the episodes to this show are? 

By the time It Pays To Be Ignorant aired, radio audiences were tiring of the intellectual quiz shows. It Pays To Be Ignorant was different than other quiz shows and enjoyed the barbs that flew between contestants as much as the dumb answers they provided.

Ruth Howard married Bob Howell and they collaborated on the scripts for It Pays To Be Ignorant until Bob passed away in 1944. Ruth continued writing the scripts after his death, but host, Tom Howard edited them to make sure the jokes flowed smoothly. For a while, the concept of It Pays To Be Ignorant was a skit on The Kate Smith Hour. Critics didn’t give the show a chance to survive, but It Pays To Be Ignorant hoodwinked everyone by lasting for more than nine years, sponsored by Philip Morris, DeSoto and Chrysler, upholding its popularity the entire time.

It Pays To Be Ignorant was watched on television from June to September of 1949 on CBS, and on NBC from July to September of 1951, with the original cast of the radio show. 

Pert Kelton

Pert Kelton (Great Falls (Montana), October 14, 19071 - Ridgewood, October 30, 1968) was an American vaudeville, radio, film and television actress. She was the first actress to play Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners, opposite Jackie Gleason, and worked as a stage actress in a dozen Broadway productions between 1925 and 1968.

Born in Great Falls, Montana, Kelton was a young comedian in A-list movies during the 1930s, often playing the funny and equally attractive best friend of the female lead character. She had a memorable performance in 1933 as the singer "Trixie" on The Bowery, alongside Wallace Beery, George Raft, Jackie Cooper and Fay Wray. Directed by Raoul Walsh, the film was about Steve Brodie, the first man who supposedly jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge and lived to tell the tale.

Kelton played the prostitute Minnie in Gregory LaCava's film Bed of Roses (1933), filmed before the Hays Code alongside Constance Bennett and Joel McCrea.

Ironically, given his subsequent Hollywood blacklisting, Kelton's last film for several years was Whispering Enemies (1939). His next performance took place on television in The Honeymooners and in other sketches on the Gleason show. The abrupt departure from the cinema due to the blacklist was explained as a result of the actress having heart problems.

In the 1940s Kelton was a familiar voice on radio shows such as Easy Aces, It's Always Albert, The Stu Erwin Show and the 1941 series We Are Always Young. In 1949 he voiced five different characters on the Texaco Star Theater radio show. She was also a regular on The Henry Morgan Show, and in the early 1950s she played a maid on Monty Woolley's The Magnificent Montague.

Kelton played Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners sketches in the DuMont Television Network production Cavalcade of Stars. Those numbers formed the basis for the 1955 CBS sitcom The Honeymooners. Jackie Gleason played her husband, Ralph Kramden, and Art Carney was their neighbor, Ed Norton. Elaine Stritch was Trixie, Norton's dancing wife, before being replaced by Joyce Randolph.

Kelton performed in the original sketches, generally lasting 10 to 20 minutes, shorter than the later half-hour series and the one-hour musical versions of the 1960s. This early version of The Honeymooners was darker and tougher than that of CBS, after Kelton was included in the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthyism, and in which she was replaced by Audrey Meadows.

In the 1960s she was invited to work on Gleason's CBS show, playing Alice's mother in an episode of the hour-long musical version of The Honeymooners (also known as The Color Honeymooners), with Sheila MacRae. like a young Alice.

In 1963 Kelton appeared in the series The Twilight Zone, playing Robert Duvall's authoritarian mother in the episode 'Miniature'.

In his last years Kelton participated in commercial advertisements for the Spic and Span brand, his public image being strongly linked to it.

Kelton debuted as a theater actress on the Broadway circuit at the age of 17, performing in Jerome Kern's play Sunny, in which she played "Magnolia" and sang a song of the same name.

Years later she was nominated twice for the Tony Awards: for Best Supporting Actress in Frank Henry Loesser's Greenwillow (1960), and in Spofford (1967–68). However, her most notable performance on Broadway was as the impatient Mrs. Paroo (Marian Paroo's mother) in Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1957), a performance she repeated in its 1962 film adaptation Live of Illusion, the role for which she is perhaps best remembered.

Pert Kelton was co-owner of the Warner Kelton Hotel, built in the late 1920s, at 6326 Lexington Avenue, Los Angeles. The hotel served actors and musicians such as Cary Grant, Orry-Kelly, and Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart. In the back it had a small open-air theater, next to a wishing well that may have inspired the song "There's a Small Hotel" from the musical "On Your Toes (1936)".

Pert Kelton died on October 30, 1968, due to heart disease in Ridgewood, New Jersey. She was 61 years old. His remains were cremated and the ashes given to her family.

Monty Woolley

Edgar Montillion Woolley, popularly known as Monty Woolley (August 17, 1888 – May 6, 1963) was an American radio, theater, film and television actor. At the age of 50 he achieved stardom for his role in the play The Man Who Came to Dinner, as well as in its later film adaptation in 1942. His most personal characteristic was his white beard.

He was born in New York City into a wealthy family (his father owned the Bristol Hotel), which is why he grew up as part of the highest social circles. Woolley received his bachelor's degree from Yale University, where Cole Porter was a classmate and close friend, and his master's degree from the same university and from Harvard University. He eventually became an assistant professor of English and dramatic studies at Yale University, having Thornton Wilder and Stephen Vincent Benét among his students.

In another area, with the beginning of World War I Woolley served in the United States Army as a lieutenant, being assigned to the General Staff in Paris.

Woolley began directing theater on the Broadway circuit in 1929 and began as an actor in 1936, after leaving his academic life. In 1939 he appeared in the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner, making a total of 783 performances. It was for this role, well received by critics, that he was typecast in roles of sharp-tongued, sophisticated and arrogant characters.

Like Clifton Webb, Woolley signed a contract with 20th Century Fox in the 1940s and appeared in numerous films until the mid-1950s. His most famous film role was his first on Broadway, in the version filmed in 1942 from The Man Who Came to Dinner, a caricature by legendary theater critic Alexander Woollcott. The film received good reviews from The New York Times.

In 1946 Woolley played himself in the 1946 Warner Bros. biography of Cole Porter, Night and Day (1946).

Woolley also worked frequently on radio as a guest artist, starting in the medium as a counterpart to Al Jolson. Woolley became a household name appearing on shows such as The Fred Allen Show, Duffy's Tavern, The Big Show, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, with Edgar Bergen and his doll Charlie McCarthy, and others.

In 1950 Woolley landed the starring role in the NBC series The Magnificent Montague. His role was that of an old Shakespearean actor who is forced to swallow his pride and work at a radio station, becoming an unlikely star while also having to battle with his wife, Lily (Anne Seymour), and with the wisecracking maid Agnes (Pert Kelton). The show was aired between November 1950 and September 1951.

At first Woolley acted on television making cameos, until he finally had his own drama series, On Stage with Monty Woolley. He also appeared in a 1954 CBS television adaptation of the play The Man Who Came to Dinner, which some critics criticized, in addition to working on other televised dramas within the Best of Broadway series.

After finishing his last film, Kismet (1955), Woolley returned to radio, where he worked for about a year, after which he was forced to retire as a result of his poor health.

Woolley was nominated twice for an Oscar, once for the Oscar for Best Actor in 1943 for The Pied Piper, and once for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1945 for Since You Went Away. In 1942 he won the Best Actor Award from the National Board of Review for his role in The Pied Piper.

Woolley was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, officially for his film work, although his star bears the television emblem.

Monty Woolley, affectionately known as "The Beard," died of kidney and heart ailments on May 6, 1963 in Albany, New York, at the age of 74. He was buried at Greenridge Cemetery in Saratoga Springs ( NY).