Willard Waterman

Willard Lewis Waterman was born on August 29, 1914 and worked on TV and radio, remembered for replacing Harold Peary as the title character of The Great Gildersleeve at the height of that show's popularity.

He attended the University of Wisconsin, where he joined Theta Chi, acted in student plays, and was a friend of Uta Hagen. His growing interest in theater put an end to his original plan to be an engineer, and he gained experience in radio at the university's station, WHA.

Waterman began his radio career at WIBA in Madison, singing in a quartet that performed "musical interludes between programs,"and came to NBC in Chicago in early 1936.

In 1950, Waterman took over the role of Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve on The Great Gildersleeve after Harold Peary was unable to secure an ownership stake in the show from Kraft Cheese. Peary left NBC for CBS due to better financial options amidst high taxes but ultimately Kraft moved the show to CBS and hired Waterman as his successor.

Peary and Waterman, who had a pre-existing friendship from their radio jobs, worked together on The Great Gildersleeve from 1950 to 1957, with Waterman mimicking Peary's voice without adopting his trademark laugh. During this time, Waterman also played Mr. Merriweather in The Halls of Ivy and had previously starred in a short-lived comedy, Those Websters, in 1945.

He had radio roles between the mid-1930s and 1950 on such shows as Chicago Theater of the Air (variety) and Harold Teen (comedy), plus four soap operas: Girl Alone, The Guiding Light, Lonely Women, The Road of Life and Kay Fairchild, Stepmother.

In his later career, Waterman took on various supporting roles in films and TV shows, including a brief stint in the adaptation of The Great Gildersleeve, as well as appearances in Vacation Playhouse, Lawman, My Favorite Martian, Bat Masterson, and The Eve Arden Show, among others. Notably, he played Mr. Quigley in Dennis the Menace and appeared five times as Mac Maginnis in The Real McCoys from 1957 to 1959. 

After 1973, he nearly retired from acting but made a comeback in 1980 with a radio commercial for Sony, which earned him a Clio Award.

In 1937, Waterman wed Mary Anna Theleen, a secretary at Nash Motors. He lived in Chicago and New York City before relocating to the San Fernando Valley in California in 1945. After 1980, he settled in Burlingame, California, near one of his daughters. 

Waterman passed away from bone marrow disease on February 2, 1995, at his home in Burlingame.

Harold (Hal) Peary

Harold (Hal) Peary was born on July 25, 1908. He was an American comedian, singer, and radio, film, television, and voice actor. He was best known for portraying Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, a recurring character on the radio series Fibber McGee and Molly, who later had his own spin-off series, The Great Gildersleeve, the first successful spin-off in American broadcasting history.

His real name was José Pereira de Faria, and he was born in San Leandro, California, to a family of Portuguese descent. Peary began performing on local radio stations in 1923, according to his memoirs, and had his own singing show, The Spanish Serenader, in San Francisco, California, before moving to Chicago, Illinois, in 1937. While still in San Francisco, he played "various roles" on Wheatenaville, a program broadcast by NBC beginning on September 26, 1932.

In Chicago, his radio work reached its peak with his character Gildersleeve, McGee's neighbor, on Fibber McGee and Molly. The character actually had several names and occupations before settling on Throckmorton Philaharmonic Gildersleeve, a manager at a lingerie factory. Peary also worked on a horror series, Lights Out, and on other radio programs, but his success and fame as Gildersleeve were the basis for developing his own show with his character.

Peary's Gildersleeve became popular enough to warrant a spin-off series. Johnson's Wax, which sponsored Fibber McGee and Molly, also supported a test recording of The Great Gildersleeve, and Kraft Foods was the sponsor of the new show. Gildersleeve was transplanted from Wistful Vista to Summerfield with more than just a change of location—he was now single (the character had a wife on Fibber McGee and Molly who was never heard from), and he was now a water inspector instead of the owner of Gildersleeve's Girlish Girdles.
The Great Gildersleeve premiered on August 31, 1941, and enjoyed continued success for the rest of the decade. Lurene Tuttle played Marjorie; Walter Tetley, a veteran of Fred Allen's Town Hall Tonight and other programs, played Leroy; Lillian Randolph played the housekeeper, Birdie; and Earle Ross as Judge Horace Hooker. Other actors who appeared in the series included Richard LeGrand as Peavey, Arthur Q. Bryan as Floyd, Ken Christy as Police Chief Gates, Shirley Mitchell as Leila Ransom, Bea Benaderet as Eve Goodwin, and occasionally Gale Gordon as Rumson Bullard.

Peary also had the opportunity to sing in some episodes of the show, such as in "Mystery Voice" (October 5, 1942). In addition, Peary starred in four feature films based on his Great Gildersleeve in the 1940s, being the only member of the radio cast to appear in the film adaptations.

In 1950, however, Peary's run as Gildersleeve came to an end. He then began a new sitcom for CBS, The Harold Peary Show, also known as Honest Harold. The series starred Joseph Kearns as veterinarian Dr. Yancey and Shirley Mitchell as Florabelle Breckenridge. The Harold Peary Show only aired for one season, with a total of 38 episodes.

In addition to his four Gildersleeve films, Peary appeared in Walt Disney's A Tiger Walks (1964) and Elvis Presley's Clambake (1967). He also worked in television, appearing in the Perry Mason episode "The Case of the Lover's Gamble" (1965). He also had roles in several sitcoms, including Blondie, the television version of Fibber McGee and Molly, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Petticoat Junction, The Brady Bunch, and The Addams Family. In the 1970s, Peary filmed a popular television commercial for the Faygo brand.

Peary worked as a disc jockey at radio station WMGM in New York, and from 1953 he hosted an hour-long show from Monday to Saturday.

As a voice actor, he participated in many animated productions by Rankin/Bass Productions, Hanna-Barbera, and others, also filming commercials for Gibraltar Savings and Loan, Charmin, Red Goose Shoes, and Challenge Dairy.

Harold Peary died on March 30, 1985 in Torrance, California, from a heart attack. He was seventy-six years old. His remains were cremated, and his ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

Ernest E. Chappell

Ernest E. Chappell was born on June 10. He was an American radio announcer and actor, best remembered for his featured role in the late 1940s radio program Quiet, Please. 

Before he began his career on radio, Chappell was "a concert baritone, a song-and-dance man in musical comedy, a lecturer and a stock company actor."

Earnest Chappel was the host and main character for Quiet Please. The cast was usually just one or two other people. The sound effects were often sparse. The music was an organ and sometimes, apiano. Although the resources may seem meager when listed here, the results were stunning. Chappel would tell his tales in first person, usually in flashback. The writer/ director was Wyllis Cooper, the same genius who created Lights Out years before and moved to Hollywood to try his hand as a film script writer. He left his old show to Arch Olober, who went on to become famous with the series while Cooper toiled away in obscurity writing screenplays. In 1947, he returned to his radio roots to produce Quiet Please (Dunning, 559). Chappel was the perfect choice for the weekly lead. There was nothing special about his voice. Although he had been a successful quiz show host on Are You A Genius?, he didn't exaggerate or project like many other actors of the time did. In fact, that's one of the noticeable differences about this series. Nobody sounds like they are acting at all, they just sound like regular people caught up in very unusual or terrifying situations. Cooper insisted on actors sounding natural, and along with his detailed dialog and surreal narratives, he proved what a remarkable medium radio could be on a small budget. After all, Cooper and Chappel did what they did without big bucks or big name actors. Instead, all they had was the imagination of one person and the acting talent of another.

The plots themselves weren't that sensational when reduced to a sentence or two. "Let The Lilies Consider" involved flowers that could think. "A Red And White Guidon" was a story about a small group of cavalry men. "Shadow Of The Wings" told the tale of a girl dying who thinks she sees an angel. These rather unexciting concepts became engrossing stories when told by Chappel, especially with the creepy organ music playing in the background. Chappel sounded just as bewildered as anyone by how unbelievable the events he witnessed were. His apologies and insecurities helped convince us that maybe it could happen. If anything, he seemed even more confused than we were because these strange things were happening to him.

"The Thing on the Fourble Board" is one of radio horror's greatest gems. Chappel relates a story about being a roughneck oil driller. His crew drills a hole into the prehistoric earth that unleashes an invisible creature, one that kills the workers until only Chappel remains. The creature becomes visible when paint is tossed on it, revealing a human/ insect combination that so unhinges the narrator that he... well, I wouldn't want to spoil it by saying more. After all, no one could relay the story better than the collective talents of Chappel and Copper.

There would probably have been more Quite Please episodes on that esteemed list, but unfortunately, only a dozen episodes survived to modern times. At least, that was the the general belief all the way up until sometime in the 1980s. But then I heard a rumor that Chappel's widow found a box of disks under the bed that turned out to be original transcriptions of the show. It sounded like another urban myth, too good to be true, yet still I hoped that maybe it was accurate. Since then, a total of 89 episodes have surfaced.

On February 10, 1925, Chappell was the announcer, as well as the director of the first radio station in Syracuse, New York, WFBL (which stood for First Broadcast License). He worked in Syracuse 1925-1927 and went to Rochester, New York, in 1928 to work at WHAM. On Monday, November 9, 1925, Chappell began writing for the Syracuse Herald. His column, "Riding the Waves With Chap", included promotion for the broadcasting industry and the local station.

In the 1930s, Chappell was master of ceremonies for Phil Spitalny's radio program. For several years on each program, Chappell also served as the announcer for The Campbell Playhouse (the sponsored continuation of The Mercury Theatre on the Air) and for The Adventures of Ellery Queen.

Chappell was also "the voice of Pall Mall" in American Tobacco's television cigarette commercials from the mid-1950s into the mid-'60s. His famous tag line: "Buy Pall Mall famous cigarettes...'OUTSTANDING! and they are mild!'"

Ernest passed away following a stroke at his home on July 4. 1983 in North Palm Beach, Florida. At his request, his body was cremated, according to his widow, Helen.

Arch Oboler

Arch Oboler (born on December 7, 1909) was a screenwriter, novelist, producer, and director who focused his work on film, radio, and television.

Born in Chicago, he was raised Protestant, although his parents were Jewish immigrants from Riga, Latvia.

Oboler attracted considerable attention for his radio scripts, and his work in this medium is considered the highlight of his career. Despite his tendency toward the macabre, he is praised as one of the greatest talents in broadcasting and is considered one of the innovators of the “golden age of radio.”

Oboler entered radio because he believed it had great unrealized potential for telling stories with ideas. He thought that the medium was being wasted on soap operas. In 1933, he wrote a spec script called Futuristics, which satirized the world of the present in light of the future. NBC bought Oboler's script and broadcast it as part of a dedicatory program to NBC's new futuristic headquarters in New York City, Radio City. The broadcast was a success, but it set the stage for Oboler's future run-ins with broadcasters. In the play, one of Oboler's characters lampoons the slogan of American Tobacco. At that time in broadcasting history, making fun of commercials was still taboo.

From 1933 to 1936, Oboler wrote potboilers for programs such as Grand Hotel and Welch's Presents Irene Rich. Things changed in 1936, when radio's leading impresario Rudy Vallée used a short radio playlet of Oboler's titled Rich Kid. The success of Rich Kid landed Oboler a lucrative 52-week stint writing plays for Don Ameche for The Chase and Sanborn Hour. During this time, Oboler wrote a number of idea plays and some were aired, in shortened form, on The Rudy Vallée Show and The Magic Key of RCA.

His early film work includes Escape (1940), Passage to the Future (1943), and A Survey Called Miracle (1948), all of which he wrote. In 1945, he made his double debut as a director with Bewitched and Strange Holiday, followed by the post-apocalyptic Five (1951), filmed in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, owned by Oboler himself. A year later, he made Bwana, the Devil of the Jungle, the first feature film in 3-D to be released in theaters. He also directed The Twonky (1953), based on a story by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym shared by science fiction author Henry Kuttner and his wife, fellow writer Catherine L. Moore). In 1956, Sidney Lumet staged Oboler's play Night of the Auk, a science fiction drama about astronauts returning to Earth after the first moon landing. In 1966, Oboler returned to directing a 3-D film, The Bubble.

On April 7, 1958, Oboler's son Peter died at the age of six when he drowned in water that had accumulated in the excavations of the author's home in Malibu.

Wyllis Cooper

 

Wyllis Oswald Cooper was born on January 26, 1899, he was an American writer, producer, and director whose career spanned radio, film, and early television, most notably as the creator of the pioneering horror anthology series Lights Out (1934–1947). Born in Pekin, Illinois, to Charles E. and Margaret L. Cooper, he served in the U.S. Army as a bugler along the Mexican border in 1916 before deploying to World War I with the American Expeditionary Force, where he endured gas attacks during the Argonne Offensive and remained in Europe until 1919. After the war, Cooper worked in advertising and journalism before entering radio in Chicago around 1928, initially as a copywriter and continuity editor for NBC and CBS.

Wyllis Cooper was the writer and creator of the quirky and spooky radio series Quiet Please and Lights Out. He had a knack for puzzling, thought-provoking, disquieting stories of invisible creatures, hallucinations (of talking flowers, for one handy example) and other scary flights of the mind.

Wyllis Cooper's macabre imagination was bred in the heart of America--he grew up in a small Illinois town called Pekin. From there it was one of the last places you'd expect a future horror/mystery writer to develop, the U.S. Cavalry. Willis Cooper served in the Signal Corps in WWI, and upon returning stateside, made a very odd transition, the one to work as an advertising copy writer. From there, a gentler switch to radio show writer.

In 1934, Wyillis Cooper went to the windy city and creating his howling, suspenseful show Lights Out. The program aired at midnight and created a spare, haunting sound. It was also quite adventurous in terms of the brutal fates to which it subjected its characters. They would boil in a ladle of steel or devoured by a giant amoeba. Cooper left the show in 1936, but it lived on. In fact, the program actually used some of his old, unproduced scripts after he departed.

He spent times on both coasts doing some screenwriting. But in 1947, he dipped back into his earlier medium, radio, creating another horror and supernatural show, Quiet Please. Like Lights Out, everything about it was quiet in a nearly menacing way. Cooper's brilliant scripts were narrated by Earnest Chappel, a former game show announcer who affected a truly creepy demeanor with his dull, gravelly delivery.

The uncompromising nature of Cooper's commitment to mind-bending, truly affecting science fiction ensured that his programs would win over listeners and draw critical acclaim.

Cooper was born at the right time, developing as a writer in the days when sound effects and appeals to the sense of hearing were paramount, due to radio's dominance. He did write for television and films, but we love him for his pioneering radio work, which you can now enjoy this comprehensive collection.

Cooper lived in Glen Gardner, New Jersey, and died in High Bridge, New Jersey, on June 22, 1955.

Lights Out!

Lights Out! was one of the most famous series of all time. Even those not interested in OTR have generally heard of Lights Out! Created by Wyllis Cooper (of Quiet, Please) in 1934, and passed on to Arch Oboler in 1936, the series went through several incarnations and reincarnations throughout its long life, lasting until 1947. The exact number of episodes is a nebulous issue, since Oboler frequently renamed episodes several times over for rebroadcast, expanded the length of some of Cooper's shows, and freely moved shows back and forth between Lights Out! and his other projects with re-edited intros, making it very difficult to identify episode origins with any degree of certainty. To make matters worse, many shows have been lost over the years. Therefore, this is by no means a definitive listing (if such a thing can actually exist), only a partial one based purely on personal bias as to what properly fits the parameters of this site and what does not. Episodes vary in length from 15 min to 60 min. In 1970, twenty-five of the Lights Out! episodes (along with one episode from Arch Oboler's Plays) were syndicated, given new names, and then rebroadcast as episodes of The Devil and Mr O. These episodes generally have better sound quality than the older versions and are sometimes mislabeled as being from the original series. 

In 1962, Arch Oboler released a 36-min LP album called Drop Dead! An Exercise in Horror. Some of the tracks from this LP are circulating as 'partial' Lights Out! episodes, most notably, "The Dark" and "Chicken Heart".

After 15 months of broadcasts limited to Chicago, NBC promoted Lights Out! to its full (Red) network on April 18, 1935, at 12:30 a.m.  It remained in that late Wednesday-early Thursday timeslot for the next four and a half years, providing initial network exposure to many of the Chicago radio acting company, who included Hal Peary, Willard Waterman, Mercedes McCambridge, Betty Winkler and Raymond Edward Johnson, among others.  But the show’s creator, Wyllis Cooper, left the show for a Hollywood screenwriting career after a year into its NBC run on June 3, 1936.

The show remained at its post-midnight timeslot of 12:30 a.m. on June 10, 1936, when young NBC staff writer Arch Oboler, 27, took over its writing and direction.  Any question that Oboler couldn’t pick up where Cooper left off was erased with his first drama, Burial Services.  The plot, concerning a paralyzed young woman being buried alive, (with all its attendant sounds), resulted in 50,000 letters, (mostly indignant complaints), sent to NBC. 

The subsequent three year run of Lights Out! is considered by many critics to be the series’ prime period when NBC gave the sustaining late night show a remarkably high production budget.  The funds allowed the program to fly Boris Karloff into Chicago to appear in a series of five encore broadcasts of popular Lights Out! stories including Oboler’s Cat Wife from April 6, 1938.  We won’t spoil the stories, but along these same lines, a shrewish woman was also the target of Oboler’s It Happened! starring Mercedes McCambridge from May 11, 1938. 

What would be the program’s longest network run, 274 episodes over four years on NBC, ended on August 16, 1939.  Lights Out! disappeared from the air until October 6, 1942, when Sterling Drug’s Ironized Yeast brought Oboler and the series back to CBS on Tuesday nights at the unusually early hour of 8:00 p.m.  Samples from this 52 week run include Bon Voyage from November 10, 1942, Meteor Man of December 22, 1942, and He Dug It Up from February 9, 1943.       

Casts in this Hollywood-based series were limited, often no more than three actors per programs, but Oboler’s scripts and liberal use of the skilled CBS sound crew gave them strong dramatic weight.  Oboler wrote reference to himself and the program’s use of gory sound effects into the May 11, 1943 drama, Murder In The Script Department. Then he pulled out all the stops and wrote himself, (going mad), into the script of the final broadcast in the CBS series on September 28, 1943, The Author & The Thing. Be advised that both plots have twist endings and involve the dark of late night. 
       
But the eight o’clock hour of broadcast, (7:00 p.m. in the Central Time Zone), often came at sunset or twilight and  worked against the title and spirit of Lights Out! despite its warning chant, “It’s…later…than…you….think…”, heard at the beginning and end of each episode.  The program’s only rated season, 1942-43, indicated that the early evening listeners weren’t yet ready for stories of ghosts, monsters and gore at that hour.  Family audiences gave vocalist Ginny Simms’ variety show on NBC a 14.2 Hooperating against  Lights Out! which registered a 10.0.  (Both beat the 5.0 scored by Blue’s combined quarter hours from newscaster Earl Godwin and Lum & Abner.)  

Lights Out! disappeared from the air again except for short summer runs on NBC in 1945 and 1946, then ABC in 1947.  These broadcasts are distinctive because they contained past and new material from Wyllis Cooper, creator of the series in 1934.  Samples from all three runs are posted, represented by Man In The Middle from August 25,1945,  The Coffin In Studio B from July 13, 1946 and  July 16, 1947’s Death Robbery, featuring the return of Boris Karloff to the freshly produced ABC summer series sponsored by Eversharp shaving and writing instruments.  

The lights were finally turned off on the series after a total of 350 original and repeat episodes on August 6, 1947.  But like the characters in so many Lights Out! stories, Arch Oboler brought a number of his stories back to life almost 25 years later in transcribed syndication as The Devil & Mr. O.  This 1970’s revival of his scripts from the 1942-43 season is represented here in The Hole, from December 3, 1971,  Three Thousand Dollars, heard again on January 21, 1972, and Cemetery, from February 25, 1972  which fittingly enough, concludes in a mausoleum.  

John Gibson

John Gibson was born on June 29, 1905 was a network radio actor who portrayed Ethelbert on radio adaptation of the pulp fiction series “Flashgun Casey, Crime Photographer.” Originally, Flashgun wasn't a cameraman. But during the first decade of his serialization, author George Harmon Coxe toned down the character's roughness and reinvented him as a hunch-following photographer with a knack for capturing crime scenes. 

In 1943, he was a tame enough character to make a CBS radio debut as "Casey, Crime Photographer." The stately Staats Cotsworth played the lead, and audience was captivated more by the character than the crime (a trend that the crime-investigation-as-entertainment genre has seemed to stray from just a bit in recent years). The adventures of Casey, crack photographer for The Morning Express, were told in this series. Casey hung out at the Blue Note Café, and was friendly with Ethelbert, the bartender, to whom he recounted his various exploits. 

John Gibson portrayed the role of Ethelbert on radio, and when the series premiered on television in April, 1951. Mr. Gibson was also a broadway, film, and television actor who might be best remembered by non-OTR buffs for his continuing role on CBS's "Edge of Night." On this installment of  "The Golden Age of Radio" we'll hear Mr. Gibson performing in excerpts from "The Magnificent Montague," "Nick Carter," "Milton Berle," and "The Columbia Workshop".

He was known for playing Barney Dunlap in the radio television program Speed Gibson of the International Secret Police. He played the chaplain in the sitcom television series The Phil Silvers Show.

He died on September 14, 1971.