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.