clickhere Visit the Radio America Store web site.Buy your 50 mp3 for &5.00Affordable Web Hosting & Podcasting $5.99 A month

Classic Radio Pictures

Enjoy The Blues

Visit The Uncleshag

Gospel Round Up

n Fibber McGee and Molly, Peary's Gildersleeve was a pompous windbag who became a consistent McGee nemesis ("You're a haa-aa-aa-aard man, McGee!" became a Gildersleeve catch phrase). But he also became a popular enough windbag that Kraft Foods---looking primarily to promote its Parkay margarine spread---sponsored a new series with Peary's Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve (the character assumed several first names on Fibber McGee and Molly) as the central, slightly softened, and slightly befuddled focus of a lively new family.

Premiering on NBC on August 31, 1941, The Great Gildersleeve moved the title character from the McGees' Wistful Vista to Summerfield, where Gildersleeve now oversaw his late sister's estate and took on the rearing of his orphaned niece and nephew, Marjorie (Lurene Tuttle followed by Louise Erickson and Mary Lee Robb) and Leroy (Walter Tetley) Forester. In a striking forerunner to such later television hits as Bachelor Father and Family Affair, both of which are centered on well-to-do uncles taking in their deceased siblings' children, Gildersleeve was a bachelor raising two children while, at first, administering a girdle manufacturing company ("If you want a better corset, of course it's a Gildersleeve") and then for the bulk of the show's run, serving as Summerfield's water commissioner, between time with the ladies and nights with the boys. Indeed, The Great Gildersleve may have been the first broadcast show to be centered on a single parent balancing between child-rearing, work, and social life, done with taste and genuine wit, often at the expense of Gildersleeve's now slightly understated pomposity.