20 Radio Stars Who Were Once As Famous As Any Movie Star

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles, actor and director of CBS’s Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast a fake news bulletin adapting H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Phone lines jammed and pockets of listeners panicked, thinking that Martians had indeed landed. Historians have found that newspapers blew the scare into a nationwide myth. Welles held a press conference, was never arrested, and went on to a long career in film and radio.

Comedian Jack Benny launched on network radio in 1932. He created a fictional version of himself: stingy, vain, always 39, and a horrible violinist. He let the rest of his cast make fun of that character, including his valet Rochester, played by Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and his wife, Mary Livingstone. He owned the coveted 7:00 p.m. Sunday slot, first on NBC, later on CBS, for two decades, commanding a weekly audience of more than 30 million.

Charlie McCarthy was the wisecracking wooden dummy of Edgar Bergen, a ventriloquist. In May 1937, Bergen and McCarthy took over NBC’s Chase and Sanborn Hour and remained at #1 in the ratings from 1937 through 1940. People knew Charlie McCarthy wasn’t real, and since it was radio, nobody could see Bergen’s lips move anyway. But they still enjoyed listening to Bergen’s excellent writing and his ability to create a distinctive Charlie McCarthy voice.

Edward R. Murrow was the European news director for CBS, and he headed a team of correspondents known as Murrow’s Boys. During the London Blitz of 1940 and 1941, he broadcast from rooftops around the city, with the sound of air raids behind him. His opening remarks, “This… is London,” delivered with a deliberate, coached pause, were inspired by CBS producer Ida Lou Anderson’s suggestion that there should be a moment before he began speaking. These broadcasts made CBS News and Murrow famous throughout the country.

In January 1937, satirical comedian Fred Allen (whose radio program was called Town Hall Tonight) made a joke about comedian Jack Benny’s violin playing. The two men turned this bit into a recurring “feud” that they eventually worked up to a joint appearance on March 14, 1937. That broadcast drew record ratings. In reality, however, Allen and Benny were close, lifelong friends, and every “insult” was scripted purely for humor.

Amos ‘n’ Andy, a daily serial created by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, premiered nationally on NBC on August 19, 1929. At the height of its popularity during the 1930-31 season, the 15-minute program had an estimated 40 million daily listeners, more than half of the radio-owning households surveyed, and movie houses regularly held up feature presentations for it. But the show was controversial from the beginning. Gosden and Corell voiced Black characters using exaggerated dialects rooted in the blackface minstrel tradition, which had long relied on racial stereotypes for comedy. Black groups, including the NAACP, criticized it at the time.

Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” was first sung by CBS’s Kate Smith in a special broadcast on November 11, 1938. Berlin originally wrote the song in 1918, but reworked it for Smith 20 years later. The song helped cement Smith’s reputation as a patriotic voice, a role she continued during World War II. She hosted continuous bond drives, including an 18-hour CBS marathon on September 21, 1943, which brought in $39 million in pledges in one day.

Singer Bing Crosby hosted NBC’s highest-rated program, the Kraft Music Hall, from 1936 to 1946. But he detested having to perform the same show live twice to accommodate both coasts’ different time zones. When NBC refused to let him pre-record it, Crosby jumped ship to ABC in 1946 and personally bankrolled the development of Ampex reel-to-reel tape. His new show, Philco Radio Time, was network radio’s first entire season recorded on magnetic tape.

For years, Fanny Brice, a veteran vaudevillian and radio star, performed the role of Baby Snooks, a precocious and troublemaking kid. Unlike many other performers whose routines evolved over the course of a career, she continued as Snooks, one of her career’s top hits, right up until her death in May 1951.

One of CBS’s highest-paid performers was Arthur Godfrey, whose folksy CBS radio and TV show, Arthur Godfrey Time, was notable for its relaxed and spontaneous format. By the early 1950s, Godfrey was responsible for approximately 12% of all CBS network revenues. On October 19, 1953, Godfrey fired singer Julius LaRosa on air, on both CBS radio and television, at the same time, letting listeners hear the firing happen live.

In 1932, Walter Winchell, the great gossip and news commentator of the time, debuted Jergens Journal, starting every show with his trademark: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America…” His delivery clocked up to 197 words per minute and sped along over the clatter of a telegraph key. He actually turned that key himself inside the studio, just to give a little flavor, since no actual incoming news bulletins ever came through it.

Vaudeville comedy team George Burns and Gracie Allen, a husband-and-wife act, came to NBC radio in 1931. In 1933, as part of a publicity gimmick, Allen began appearing on other stars’ shows as if she were looking for her lost brother. Fans fell for the bit, writing in with information about where they had seen her, and following her from one program to the next.

In 1931, Eddie Cantor, a vaudeville star, debuted on NBC’s Chase and Sanborn Hour with lighthearted musical comedy that provided some distraction from the struggles of the Depression. In the 1932-1933 season, he pulled a 58.6 rating among surveyed radio households, the highest rating recorded during radio’s Golden Age. He came up with the name and actually launched the March of Dimes on the air in January 1938.

The Rise of the Goldbergs, created, written, and starring Berg as its lead character, the family matriarch Molly Goldberg, premiered on NBC radio in November 1929. During her more-than-20-year career with the series, both in its radio days and its subsequent life as a TV series, Berg wrote more than 5,000 scripts, making her one of broadcasting’s first female showrunners and executives, as well as its star.

A real-life husband-and-wife team, Jim and Marian Jordan, played Fibber McGee and Molly, which debuted on NBC in April 1935. The show was set at 79 Wistful Vista. Its running gag was that Fibber would open an overstuffed hall closet and there would be a long, complicated crash of falling objects, created entirely by sound effects. It stayed in the top-5 nationally in the 1940s.

Fibber McGee and Molly’s pompous next-door neighbor, Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, was portrayed by Harold Peary beginning in 1938. NBC found the character popular enough to launch him as the star of The Great Gildersleeve in August 1941, the first instance in broadcasting of a supporting character from a hit program being spun off into his own series.

Singer Rudy Vallée introduced The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour on NBC in October 1929. He used a megaphone to direct his smooth, crooning voice toward the microphone because early microphones were not sensitive enough to detect the singing. The format of this program was the pattern for the entire network variety show. In addition, Vallée served as a talent scout and helped give some national prominence to such performers as Bob Hope, Kate Smith, and Milton Berle.

Gabriel Heatter, a commentator on the Mutual Network, first gained attention in April 1936 when he talked off the cuff for 53 consecutive minutes during the execution of convicted kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann. During World War II, he became known for opening his broadcasts with “Good evening, everyone, there’s good news tonight!” whenever he had positive war news to share with worried families.

Comedian Red Skelton started his own NBC series in September 1941, featuring the Mean Widdle Kid character “Junior,” famous for the catchphrase “I dood it.” The phrase became so popular that after Gen. James Doolittle led a bombing raid on Tokyo in April 1942, some headlines read, “Doolittle Dood It.”

Will Rogers, a folk humorist and former vaudeville performer, spent his Sunday nights talking plainly to a nation tired of the Depression on The Gulf Headliners from 1933 to 1935, mixing political commentary with genuine comfort. When Rogers died in a plane crash in Alaska on August 15, 1935, The Gulf Headliners went off the air, and the news spread across America like a shock.

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