My own personal recollections of the golden days of radio are intimate and priceless. As a boy, my chums and I would hurry home from Enos School to hear the fifteen-minute adventures of Hop Harrigan, Commander Winslow, Sky King, Terry and the Pirates and Jack Armstrong ("The All America Boy"). During the day, while pursuing her career as a housewife and mother, my Mom would enjoy the genesis of the soap operas, "Ma Perkins," "Our Gal, Sunday" and others. My Father once burned up a pair of gloves he had forgotten that he had laid on the kitchen stove while he was engrossed in listening to a live broadcast of the Rose Bowl football game one New Years Day. In the evenings, our family would gather around the RCA consol as my Father would check the radio log in the daily paper and announce, "there’s good listening tonight." Good listening! How long has it been since I have heard that particular gerund!

And good listening there would be. Comedies, like The Fibber McGee and Molly Show, Life With Luigi, The Edgar Bergen – Charlie McCarthy Show and others. Adventure, such as I Love a Mystery, Sherlock Holmes, The Green Hornet and The Shadow (who could forget Orsen Welles saying "Who knows what evil lurks in the hears of men? The Shadow knows!") -- and spine-tingling suspense like Light’s Out and my own personal favorite, Inner Sanctum. Radio has been aptly called "The Theatre of the Mind," and that it was. Fat men like William Conrad could become Matt Dillon in Gun Smoke, allowing our imaginations to create the physical character of the Marshal as well as the setting of 1870s Dodge City. Television was only a dream – but a dream that was never fully realized, as in no way could a 27-inch screen match up to the limitless boundaries and creativity of the human imagination.

So it was with great personal expectations that I again journeyed north to Normal, Illinois and the Heartland Theatre Company for their special project, produced in partnership with the McLean County Museum of History, The Golden Days of Radio. I was not disappointed. My own long gone childhood and the almost forgotten theatre of the mind came flooding back as I spent a delightful and charming hour-and-a-half with my old friends, Fibber McGee and Molly, George and Gracie, Baby Snooks et. al.

Forgoing their tiny pocket theatre, The Heartland Theatre Company had moved into the larger "Great Room" of the Normal Community Activity Center at One Normal Plaza for this presentation, and it is a good thing they did! While their 60-seat black box theatre is intimate and charming, there is no way it could have accommodated the large audience which filled the Great Room to almost capacity. The production, staged on a stage set which, for this production, was perfectly simple and simply perfect, consisted of a ninety-minute one-act, reproducing, in a studio setting complete with the required "Stand By," "Applause" and "On The Air" illuminated signs, the actual scripts from episodes of The Fibber McGee and Molly Show, The Baby Snooks Show, The Bickersons, Vic and Sade, The Burns and Allen Show and concluding with The Fred Allen Show. The evening was hosted WGLT’s jazz and swing diva, Laura Kennedy (other performances will be hosted by WJBC personality, Ken Behrens and WJBC announcer Todd Wineburner) with Paul Carnegie (who, for the last 28 episodes of The Green Hornet, was the voice of Kato) as the live on-air announcer who doubled doing the live sound effects (no pre-recorded effects here!).

Portraying Fibber and Molly (who were actually Jim and Marian Jordan from Peoria) were Mike Dentino and Sadie Hawthorne, backed up by Frank Thomas as The Old Timer ("That’s pretty good, Johnny, but that ain’t the way I heared it!") and Paul Carnegie as Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, a character, originally played by Harold Perry, who would spin off to have his own hit radio comedy. Fibber McGee’s hall closet worked its way into the vocabulary of American English, and it was certainly not forgotten in this production. Some of the fun was watching Carnegie make the sound effect of the closet’s contents spilling onto the floor! What wonderful memories!

Most people under sixty today think of Fanny Brice as being Barbara Streisand’s Funny Girl. Few realize that when her career was in decline, she turned to radio and, with her straight man, Hanley Stafford as "Daddy," she created the terrible tot, Baby Snooks, a character originally written for her by Moss Hart, which reinvigorated Brice’s career in comedy and with whom she would stick to the end of her life. Peoria’s Rebekah Bourland did a superb job as Snooks, sounding so much like I remember Fanny Brice that I could close my eyes and be back in front of my family’s old RCA consol again. Retired features writer for The Pantagraph, James Keeran did an equally good job, replacing the late Hanley Stafford as Snooks embattled "Daddy," while Pat White played the foil, Mrs. Shrewsbury in the evening’s Baby Snooks episode.

A spin-off from a skit on The Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy Show, The Bickersons, staring Dom Ameche as John and Frances Langford as Blanche, actually provided the inspiration for Jackie Gleeson’s The Honeymooners. In the Heartland production, the team of Mel and Bonnie White captured the essence of Ameche and Langford beautifully. Vic and Sade, featuring Bourland, Keeran and Hawthorne as Rush Gook, Vic Gook and Sade Gook, was the only show that I did not remember from the actual golden days of radio. Originally a fifteen-minute morning show, it was clearly the weakest script in an evening of block-busters, and, I think, was included because its creator, Paul Rhymer, was a Bloomington/Normal native.

Pat and Bruce White, both of Peoria, were great fun as the arguably funniest husband and wife team on radio, George Burns and Gracie Allen. Bonnie White and Frank Thomas played another husband and wife team, Portland Hoffa and Fred Allen. Ably backed up by the denizens of Allen’s Alley, Senator Claghorn (Bruce White), Titus Moody (Paul Carnegie) and Mrs. Nussbaum (Rebekah Bourland), they concluded the evening. The bridges between each of the scenes must be mentioned as the concept was an inspired one. Each bridge was an actual recording of a singing commercial from the golden days of radio. I even caught myself, to the consternation of my seat-mates, I am sure, singing along with them. Even after all these years, I still remembered the words.

When the house lights came up after the finale by the entire company and the curtain calls, I noticed two things I found disturbingly curious. The entire almost-capacity audience was my age or older. And during the entire evening, through out which we laughed aloud almost constantly, I never heard the Australian Verb used once! I admit that Lenny Bruce changed the face (well, at least the vocabulary) of comedy probably forever – but after this delightful little trip down memory lane, I wonder if the change was really necessary.

Reprinted from The Pamphlet