Parker Fennelly

Parker Fennelly (October 22, 1891 – January 22, 1988) was an American radio and film actor. He participated in hundreds of radio shows.

He performed on stage, radio, film, and television. He grew up in Maine and studied acting at the Leland Powers School in Boston. Fennelly worked in theater for much of his career, appearing in 15 Broadway plays from 1924 to 1955, including Mister Pitt (with Walter Huston), Our Town, and The Southwest Corner. Two of Fennelly's plays were produced on Broadway: Fulton of Oak Falls (co-written with George M. Cohan) in 1937, and Cuckoos on the Hearth in 1941. The latter was often performed thereafter in summer theaters around the country. Several other plays of Fennelly's were also successfully produced.

Fennelly began working on radio during the late 1920s in a comedy duo with Arthur Allen called the Stebbins Boys, appearing on the programs The Stebbins Boys of Bucksport Point and Snow Village Sketches (also known as Soconyland Sketches). Fennelly and Allen portrayed stereotypical dry New Englanders, a role Fennelly would play over and over.

Fennelly appeared on many live television programs of the 1950s, such as Philco Television Playhouse, Studio One, and Lux ​​Video Theatre. Among his film credits were Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble With Harry (1955), The Kettles On Old MacDonald's Farm (1957), Pretty Poison (1968), and Angel In My Pocket (1969). From the late 1950s to the 1980s, he was a commercial spokesperson for Pepperidge Farm on radio and television, reprising the role of Titus Moody.

Fennelly embodied the moody New England Yankee with roles in radio, film and television. Weekly he played Titus Moody on the program "Allen's Alley", a highly successful radio show hosted by Fred Allen.

In later years he became familiar as a television spokesperson for the Campbell Soup Company. In 1971 he worked in the Universal film How to Frame a Figg, alongside Don Knotts.

He died at the age of 96 in Peekskill, New York. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Elspeth Thexton Eric

Elspeth Thexton Eric was born on September 15, 1907. She was an American actress in old-time radio, "usually cast as the other woman in soaps and serials".

The daughter of a doctor, Elspeth Thexton Eric was born in Chicago, Illinois. She attended Bradford Academy and graduated from Wellesley College with a double major in economics and English literature. After hearing tales of woe about "girls who had tried to crash the great White Way and failed, she enrolled in a business school and left word with her friends in New York to let her know when a job was to be had there.

Eric's initial work on radio came in Big Sister and Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories.
Other programs on which Eric appeared included The Haunting Hour, The FBI in Peace and War, Abbott Mysteries, Ever Since Eve, Front Page Farrell, Quick as a Flash, Rosemary,  Mommie and the Men, Inner Sanctum Mystery, Bulldog Drummond, Manhattan at Midnight, Green Valley, U.S.A., Gang Busters, 21st Precinct, Grand Central Station, and Mr. District Attorney.

Elspeth Eric was one of radio's busiest actresses throughout the 1940s and 1950 and was heard on such radio drama series usually playing gun molls and ladies with criminal intents. In the 1970s she wrote and was heard on many of Himan Brown's CBS MYSTERY THEATER radio series.

Eric gained early acting experience with the Woodstock Summer Theatre. In 1932, she acted in the troupe at the Westchester Playhouse at Mount Kisco, New York.

Eric had the role of Lil Monte in the Road of Life soap opera, which was broadcast on TV and radio in 1955, with the same cast. She also appeared in "His Name Was Death," an episode of Robert Montgomery Presents (March 18, 1957), "Young Man Adam," an episode of Studio One (December 29, 1952), and "The Unfraid," an episode of The Web (November 23, 1952).
In a 1955 newspaper article, Eric indicated her preference for working in radio.

Elspeth Eric died of cancer in Manhattan in 1993.

William Gargan

William Gargan was born on July 17, 1905, he was an American radio, film, and television actor.

His full name was William Dennis Gargan, and he was born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. His older brother was actor Edward Gargan.

After completing his studies, Gargan worked as a salesman of bootleg whiskey to speakeasies in New York, later joining a detective agency. While visiting his brother at a musical theatre, he was offered a stage job, which he accepted, beginning his stage career by performing in the play Aloma of the South Seas.

Gargan played character roles in many Hollywood productions, playing policemen, priests, reporters, adventurers and stereotypical Irishmen. His roles included Detective Ellery Queen, whom he played twice, although he became best known as Detective Martin Kane in the 1949-51 radio-television series Martin Kane, Private Eye. He also played a private detective on Barrie Craig's NBC radio show Confidential Investigator, which aired from 1951 to 1955.

Gargan's first regular radio role was Captain Flagg on Captain Flagg and Sergeant Quirt, beginning in February 1942. He also portrayed Ross Dolan in I Deal in Crime, and Inspector Burke in Murder Will Out, and was host of G. I. Laffs.

In 1949 Gargan was in New York City when he phoned acquaintance Frank Folsom of RCA. Folsom invited Gargan for lunch. He went to the fifty-third floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. Inside were executives from BBD&O, The New York Stock Exchange, and others. During lunch Gargan mentioned that he was looking for a job in TV.

Folsom phoned Norm Blackburn, VP of TV and Radio at NBC and a good friend of Gargan’s. Gargan was asked if he’d be interested in playing a pipe-smoking detective, sponsored by the U.S. Tobacco Company. The show became Martin Kane, Private Eye. It would be shot for TV and separately done for radio as well. Mutual Broadcasting carried the radio series. It debuted on Sunday August 7, 1949 at 4:30PM eastern time. Meanwhile, the TV version aired on NBC Thursdays at 10PM.

Gargan's career ended in 1958 when he became ill with laryngeal cancer, necessitating the removal of his larynx. Speaking in an artificial voice, Gargan became an activist and spokesman for the American Cancer Society, warning on many occasions about the dangers of smoking.

Gargan and his wife, Mary were married in Baltimore on January 19, 1928. They had two sons. Bill (nicknamed Barrie) was born on February 25, 1929. Leslie was born on June 28, 1933.

William Gargan died of a heart attack in 1979 while on a plane from New York to San Diego, California. He was 73 years old. He was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in San Diego.

Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator

Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator was a detective drama aired on NBC Radio from October 3, 1951 to June 30, 1955.

William Gargan, who also played the better known television and radio detective Martin Kane, was the voice of New York eye Barrie Craig while Ralph Bell portrayed his associate, Lt. Travis Rogers. Craig's office was on Madison Avenue and his adventures were fairly standard PI fare. He worked alone, solved cases efficiently, and feared no man. As the promos went, he was "your man when you can't go to the cops. Confidentiality a specialty." A few years earlier Gargan had played a similar character in Martin Kane, Private Eye. Gargan also starred in the role in an unsuccessful 1952 TV pilot written and directed by Blake Edwards. It was presented on ABC's Pepsi-Cola Playhouse as "Death the Hard Way" (October 17, 1954).

This series has been produced with various spellings of the primary character name. Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator is one of the few detective radio series that had separate versions of it broadcast from both coasts. Even the spelling changed over the years. It was first "Barry Crane" and then "Barrie Craig". NBC produced it in New York from 1951 to 1954 and then moved it to Hollywood where it aired from 1954 to 1955.

Detective Barrie Craig (William Gargan) worked alone from his Madison Avenue office. Unlike his contemporaries Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Craig had a laid-back personality, somewhat cutting against the popular hard-boiled detective stereotype. Others in the cast included Ralph Bell, Elspeth Eric, Parker Fennelly, Santos Ortega, Arnold Moss, Parley Baer, Virginia Gregg and Betty Lou Gerson.

Ed Wynn The Fire Chief

The shows star Ed Wynn as one of his most memorable characters, "The Firechief." Best known as a fantastic character actor and vaudevillian style clown, Ed Wynn's babbling voice and trademark giggle are unforgettable.

Isaiah Edwin Leopold was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 9, 1886, known by the stage name Ed Wynn, was a popular American actor and comedian, who had a formidable career of almost 65 years where he participated in vaudeville and theaters, in television shows, on radio and in film. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for his activity in film and television, respectively. Ed Wynn inspired the English voice recording of the animated cartoon Wally Gator.

As a teenager he ran away from home. In his youth he worked as an assistant to W. C. Fields. He then appeared in various vaudevilles in the 1910s and, from 1914, in the Ziegfeld Follies, a series of Broadway stage productions based on the Parisian Folies Bergère. Ed Wynn's first Broadway success came a few years later with The Perfect Fool (1921).

He subsequently hosted a radio show called Texaco's Fire Chief from 1932 to 1939 before making his small-screen debut in 1950. That same year he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Living Personality.

He featured Ed Wynn as the Firechief. Sponsored by Texaco, the show aired its last episode in 1935, producing 12 episodes.

Outside of his radio career, Ed Wynn starred in 1920's silent films and continued to star on the big screen until his death in the 1960's. He also starred in his own TV show, "The Ed Wynn Show." His bumbling voice is instantly recognizable in the animated feature film, "Alice in Wonderland" and many others.

He also appeared in film and was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).​ He voiced the character of the Mad Hatter in Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland (1951). He also acted in Mary Poppins (1964) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). He also appeared in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, playing a traveling salesman facing death.

Ed Wynn was a Freemason and belonged to Lodge No. 9 in Philadelphia. He died of esophageal cancer on June 19, 1966, in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of 79.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.

The novel is an amalgamation of three short stories Miller had originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, inspired by the author's participation in the bombing of a monastery at the Battle of Monte Cassino during World War II. The book is considered one of the classics of science fiction and has never been out of print. Appealing to mainstream and genre critics and readers alike, it won the 1961 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, and often appears on "best of" lists.  It has been recognized three times with Locus Poll Awards for best all-time science fiction novel.  Its themes of religion, recurrence, and church versus state have generated a significant body of scholarly research.

The story starts approximately 500 after a global nuclear war has reduced mankind to barbarism. It centres around an order of monks living in an abbey in the former US Southwest.

The story had previously been published as a series of novels in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science.

It was adapted for radio by John Reed, and aired in 15 episodes in 1981 on National Public Radio stations. Directed by Karl Schmidt, the series starred Fred Coffin, Russell Horton, Bart Hayman and Herb Hartig with narration by Carol Collins. Music for the series was by Greg Fish and Bob Budney and the Edgewood College Chant Group.

Lee Tracy

Born in Atlanta , Georgia, April 14, 1898, he studied electrical engineering at Union College, and later served as an ensign in World War I. In the early 1920s he decided to work as an actor, becoming a star on Broadway with his leading role in George Kelly's 1924 play The Show-Off.

In 1929 he came to Hollywood, where he played a number of films as a journalist. On stage he had been the reporter Hildy Johnson in the original 1928 version of The Front Page, and was a columnist in the likeness of Walter Winchell in the 1932 film Blessed Event. Tracy was also a journalist in Advice to the Lovelorn (1933), loosely based on the novel Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West.

He played Buzzard, the criminal who leads Liliom (Charles Farrell) into a fatal robbery, in the 1930 version of Liliom. He also played Lupe Velez's frenetic manager in Gregory La Cava's The Half-Naked Truth (1932), and the following year he played John Barrymore's agent in George Cukor's Dinner at Eight.

His burgeoning career was temporarily interrupted in 1934 while he was filming Viva Villa! in Mexico City, in which Wallace Beery played Pancho Villa. Tracy urinated from a balcony in Mexico City as a military parade passed by. He was immediately fired from the production and replaced by Stuart Erwin.

During World War II Tracy returned to uniform, and in the 1950s he continued to work in film and television series, even taking on leading roles in some of them, such as New York Confidential, being one of the actors who played the role of detective Martin Kane on television. He also played the President of the United States in the stage and film versions of The Best Man (1964), written by Gore Vidal. For his role as President Art Hockstader in the film, Tracy received his only Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Tracy returned to military service. His career after the war focused increasingly on radio work and performing on the rapidly expanding medium of television. Between 1949 and 1954, he performed on both the radio and televised versions of the weekly series Martin Kane: Private Eye, in which he was one of four actors to play the title role. In 1958, he returned to the role of newspaper reporter in the syndicated series New York Confidential. Tracy did continue to return periodically to the big screen. In 1964, he portrayed the former President of the United States "Art Hockstader", a fictitious character loosely based on Harry Truman, in both the stage and film adaptations of Gore Vidal's novel The Best Man. The movie version featured Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson. Tracy received his only Academy Award nomination, as Best Supporting Actor, for his performance in the film.

Lee Tracy died in Santa Monica, California, of cancer on October 18, 1968. He was 70 years old. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Shavertown, Pennsylvania.