Golden Age of Radio

LEAH RAY As She Appears Under the MIKErocscope By Lee Mortimer LEAH RAY is next Baby Rose Marie, one of the radio ’s young stars. She was born nineteen years ago in Norfolk, Virginia, and has a cute Southern accent to substantiate the fact. Ambition as a kid led her to be a literary critic. She was most enthused about Dickens and Thackeray. But now she’s glad she didn’t pursue the pen, because she makes as much on one radio broadcast as most literary critics make in a year. When seventeen years old she was taken by her mother to Los Angeles, where she was to finish school. She was all prepared to enroll in the Hollywood High School on a Monday, when in the previous Friday her uncle, who is in the music business, introduced her to Phil Harris . This was when Harris played at the Cocoanut Grove . Phil needed a girl singer. Lead used to sing in parties, so she asked for an audition. After hearing her voice Phil hired her. Her first salary was $ 50 a week. So it transpi

Frances Scott Femcee of It Takes A Woman doesn’t know the word can’t. All anyone had to do to het Frances Scott going on a project or an idea is to tell her it can’t be done. Miss Scott is the well known “femcee” of a number of radio and television shows, most of which she not only appears on but helps to write, cast and direct. One of the most popular of her shows at the moment is a transcribed series presented locally, throughout the country at different times and on different networks. It’s called It Takes A Woman. Frances Scott was born in San Francisco. Her father was an advertising man. It was this fact that led in directly to Frances’ present career. Like all children, Frances had imagination, but hers took a very practical turn. Radio was then an infant industry and in Frances’s fertile mind the ides grew that someday radio would be a wonderful medium for advertising. So, when she was graduated from high school, she hied herself to New York . She wound up on

“Truth or Consequences” debuted on radio today in 1940.   It would appear on radio or television for over three decades.

ON THE AIR TODAY: Kate Smith Speaks, on CBS at noon, E.D.T, sponsored by Grape Nuts. It’s a semi-vacation that Kate Smith is having this summer. When the sponsors of her noonday talks decided they’d like to keep the show on the air through the hot weather. Kate countered with a request that she be allowed to go on the air from her summer home at Lake Placid—and that’s what was finally decided, to everybody’s satisfaction. You ought to see the comfortable set-up Kate and her manager, Ted Collins, have up there in the cool mountains. Kate’s home is on Buck Island, about a mile and half off shore from the town of Lake Placid. It’s almost like a small village in itself, because both Kate and Ted have their homes there, plus guest houses, boat houses, a tennis court and a big outdoor barbecue pit. Three speedboats are moored to the dock, so that nobody need be disappointed when the urge to go somewhere  comes. Kate herself is an expert at operating a speedboat, and usually insis

Former radio star dies OLNEY, III. (AP) –Bernardine Doherty, whose role as Sade in the Vic and Sade series endeared her to early radio listeners, had died at a hospital here. Mrs. Foherty, window of Dr. Chester Doherty, associate professor of medicine at North western University Medical School, died Thursday of an internal aliment. A native of Madison, Wis., Mrs. Doherty studied drama at the University of Wisconsin and later appeared in several Broadway hits, including Seven Year Love, Strictly Dishonorable and Strange Interlude. She worked for the NBC in Chicago, appearing in several pioneer radio shows. Vic and Sade ran from 1932 to 1945 and won fame for its humorous depiction of a small-town mid-western family. After the series ended, Mrs. Doherty toured in a road show with actor Walter Huston, starring in Apple of his Eye and September Song.

FLORENCE WILLIAMS—a native of St. Louis, Mo., was a successful dress designer before turning actress; she still makes all her own clothes. Florence made her radio debut as Barbara Ware in Roses and Drums. Since then she has appeared regularly on the stage and radio at the same time. She plays the part of Sally in Front Page Farrell (M-F., 5:45 P.M. EDT, NBC). 

DOUBLY AIR-MINDED Playing the flying secret agent, Joyce Ryan, in Mutual’s Captain Midnight for the past five years has had a marked effect on Marilou Neumayer’s private life. The daily dialogue dealing with flying led to a real life interest in airplanes and what makes them run. Now Marilou, with sixty flying hours to her credit and her pilot’s license won, would rather fly than eat. Of course, her radio commitments keep her pretty busy. In addition to Captain Midnight , Marilou is also heard as the sultry siren, Stella Curtis—and here’s a piece of type casting, as far as looks as concerned—in the CBS and NBC Ma Perkins show. She’s featured on several other Chicago shows, like First Nighter, Freedom of Opportunity. Undecided as to whether it would be singing or acting as a career, Marilou went to Chicago in 1940 to try her luck in radio there. Her luck, it turned out, was exceptionally good. In two short months of knocking on doors, Marilou won the audition for the par