Harold Peary was just 5' 5" and other things

Harold Peary & The Great Gildy

And Harold Peary, as satan

Peary, Tetley and Tuttle from 1941's Great Gildersleeve

An editorial on the death of Harold Peary (1985)

Memories of Wistful Vista

Click here

And now for something completely different!

On March 28, 1944, Jim Jordan got a bad case of pneumonia, was put into the hospital and he and Marian missed an episode of their own show.

So instead of Fibber and Molly in their comfortable positions as door-answerers and joke throwers, substitutes Harold Peary and Walter Tetley took their place.

That sounds like it should work out perfectly.  After all, Peary had a spin-off show of his own from Fibber McGee and Molly at the time (Great Gildersleeve) and was familiar with writer Don Quinn, commercial spokesman Harlow Wilcox and two of Fibber's co-stars were also co-stars on the Great Gildersleeve (Shirley Mitchell and Arthur Q. Bryan.)

This is one very interesting episode and I thought I would provide you with a written commentary of the audio.  So off we go...


An interesting start. It's not unusual to hear Gildersleeve in this surrounding but it is indeed strange to hear Tetley's voice in Wistful Vista...


In case you haven't realized it, this is the first - and I believe only - time "we" are on the front porch of the McGee home knocking on the door. Every other episode is about the McGees being inside their home with people coming to the door. So in the mind's eye, you can actually visualize walking up the steps and ringing the doorbell.

And Beulah (played by Marlin Hurt - yes, a white man) did a fantastic job in this episode as he got more lines than usual.

Hurt got his own show not too long after this episode but died suddenly of a heat attack in 1949.

And speaking of dying...

This Gildersleeve joke didn't go anywhere. It's a fine joke and it isn't hard to see that it's a Don Quinn line. Perhaps it's all in the delivery. If Fibber said it, it would have been funny....


I'm sure Birdie's full name was mentioned on the Great Gildersleeve show but I certainly don't remember it. "Birdie Lee Coggins" will be stored away now for trivia purposes.

How is it though that Birdie and Beulah happen to know each other when Summerfield and Wistful Vista are so far apart? We'll never know.


To my knowledge, this is the only time "she" changes her classic catchphrase. She says, "Love that boy!" about Leroy.


Peary flubs his line. He probably didn't have much time to go over the script seeing how Jim Jordan was ill.


The above sounds more like a part of a script on the Great Gildersleeve program as Leroy needles his Unk.


Another case of Peary bumbling through his lines! I don't fault Peary, mind you, as I'm sure he had little time to prepare. Notice though, how fluently Tetley reads his lines throughout the show.


A funny hall closet routine!


Leroy says, "For corn's sake" - which was one of his many catchphrases he used on the Great Gildersleeve program and which Ben Ohmart and Charles Stumpf later would use as the title for their book about Tetley:

Also a Brownie camera is mentioned.  For those who don't know, this is what they look like:

And according to Wikipedia, synthetic rubber of one kind or another has been around his 1879.


Sigmund Wellington shows up at the door.  Gildersleeve seems to know him but Wellington didn't become a character until 1943, long after Peary had left the show. (Ransom Sherman played Wellington as well as other characters, including the voice of Molly's Uncle Dennis.)

Wellington mentions a Madame Curie movie poster:

Gildersleeve finds Fibber's mandolin and plays and sings, "Pretty Red Wing" - which is the exact same song Fibber tried to play and sing with the mandolin the episode of Fibber McGee and Molly a week prior to this one!

A nicer version:



Intentional or unintential, Peary is able to slip in his sponsor Kraft into the conversation of Harlow Wilcox...


Even Harlow gets a case of the flubs...


Doc Gamble (Bryan) stops by. Again, Gildersleeve and the Doc seem like old friends when in fact Doc Gamble didn't start on the show until 1943, when Gale Gordon went into the Coast Guard.

As a matter of fact, before Peary became Gildersleeve and played only bit parts on Fibber McGee and Molly, he played a doctor on two seprate occasions, one of them named "Doctor Gildersleeve."

Bryan played "Floyd" the barber on the Great Gildersleeve.


After the song, we get to hear from Alice Darling (Shirley Mitchell), the war worker who is a boarder in the McGee household. She of course plays Leila Ransom on the Gildersleeve program, his almost-always love interest. Other than the pun with her last name, there are no jokes about her being his love interest on the Gildersleeve show, which is quite surprising.


The show's ending is quite satisfying.

A fun show, wouldn't you say?

If you liked this commentary and would like to see more like this, it would be nice if you would let me know by comment or an email. I could do this in the future during lean times.

©Jimbo 2010/2011

Louise Erickson as Judy

Review - Honest Harold (The Harold Peary Show)

Imagine The Great Gildersleeve show.  Now imagine taking away all the characters on the show besides Gildy and replacing them with ones of inferior talent.  If you can successfully do both, you'll have a 'vision" of the 1950's radio program called, "Honest Harold."

The show is situated very much like The Great Gildersleeve.  This is certainly what Harold Peary envisioned in 1949 when he left NBC for CBS.  It's not like he was the only one doing this as many of his contemporaries were doing the same thing (Jack Benny, Amos and Andy, etc.)  He was sure he and his cast would rake in more revenue, would gain a bigger audience... but none of that happened  When he left NBC he assumed Kraft (the Gildersleeve sponsor) would jump on the bandwagon and take the successful Gildersleeve Show right along with him.  But Kraft was super faithful to NBC and Peary wound up at CBS without his sterling cast and without his show.

To make matters worse, William Waterman (a man who looked and sounded an awful lot like Harold Peary) stepped right in and replaced him on The Great Gildersleeve without skipping a beat.  Most people never knew the difference when he left the show!

Honest Harold was about Peary running a daytime radio show for women called, "Honest Harold: The Homemaker."  He would sing and give tips to the gals about housework.  He was a bachelor who lived with his mother.  Actually, this was probably a 100% innocent situation in 1950 but kind of queer when we reflect back on Honest Harold's "life."

Although this show boasted Peary, Parley Baer and Joseph Kearns, I dare say all 3 played their weakest parts of any show in recollection here.  Kearns is particularly weak in his role of Doc Yak-Yak, an annoying "Judge Hooker"-type character in a rip off of the Gildersleeve show.   Joining the cast is Peary's real life wife, Gloria Holliday playing one of his girlfriends.  Sorry, but she's no Shirley Mitchell or Bea Benaderet.

Honest Harold lasted just one lonesome, unimpressive season.  His partnership with mega-talent Walter Tetley was broken and Peary's show business career would continue it's stumble from here.

It's not a horrible show; but it's a far cry from The Great Gildersleeve.  2 Stars at best.





©Jimbo 2010/2011

Hal Peary writes

Gildy, Judge Hooker and Floyd Munson

Harold Peary, Earle Ross and Arthur Q. Bryan

Gildy and some more Wonder Boy

Courtesy  of Cobalt Club

Pairing of Peary and Tetley was a magical match

From my original article in the March/April "The Radio Times."

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Lum and Abner. Fibber McGee and Molly. Burns and Allen. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Martin and Lewis.

Those are probably some of the names you think of when you reflect on great comedy teams. There's no doubt why you do; for each one of the above teams were not only funny, they had incredible sustainability and lasted many years. Not only that, each of the above has a consecrated place in the National Radio Hall of Fame.

There's a another pair however, that's not considered a "team" by classic definition. Harold Peary and Walter Tetley were together 9 years on the comedy show, The Great Gildersleeve.

Peary's background was that of a singer of Spanish melodies - not as an actor. However, he was armed with a trademark bellowing voice and made his way up from early radio baritone to a 1937 fill-in on the big NBC hit show Fibber McGee and Molly, to having his own sitcom (the first sitcom spin off in history.)

Here's what happened: Gildersleeve played many parts but finally went to writer Don Quinn and asked to settle in on just one weekly role. Quinn wrote in the character Throckmorten P. Gildersleeve who would be McGee's next door neighbor. Everything about the character would be big: his belly, his name, his voice and Quinn gave him a girdle factory to run -- a pun about rotund people, itself.

Only after about a year on Fibber McGee and Molly, Peary was actually getting applause when he entered on the show- - something no other character was getting. He and Fibber would play off each other and accuse each other of stealing and other terrible things, almost coming to blows before Gildy would say, "You're a harrrrrrrd man, McGee" - and that is he became known for when he worked on that show. His rascally laugh too, a trademark that has endured generationally.

In the NBC spin off, The Great Gildersleeve, Peary played the part of a bachelor father figure to a family that was not his own. This is a contradiction in itself because Gildersleeve was actually a child-like character, more content at having fun (singing, dating, kissing!) than working his tedious job as Summerville's Water Commissioner. He never took his job seriously as he was always late for work (always!), often played hooky and was "stuck behind the eight ball." Though I don't think he ever said this, I think Gildy actually hated his job.

The non-nuclear family aspect was a very unique concept in entertainment when the show arrived in 1942. Gildy's new family consisted of his teenaged niece Marjorie (played by another veteran actress Lurene Tuttle) and a very bright, early teen in the hyper-dimensional Leroy (Tetley.)

Girded with a part-Scottish, part Brooklyn accent and with the ability to use words to cut as sharp as a razor, Tetley contrasted well against his oafish, probably-Midwestern uncle. Gildersleeve was not the father - just a figurehead and Leroy was not the son, just a facsimile - a nephew (the son of Gildersleeve's sister.) Despite the fact they barely knew each other, Gildy and Leroy had a special relationship from day one in every sense of the word.

At the age of 7, Tetley was a star, bringing in a bundle of money. By age 16, Tetley was a minor superstar radio veteran having already amassed some 2,800 broadcasts. When Tetley got the job as Leroy he was like the cleanup hitter for the New York Yankees as far ability goes. He had been lauded nationwide as a notorious scene-stealer. Whenever he guest starred on a show the cast and audience loved him and the biggest actors and show began asking specifically for him to appear and Tetley made the rounds at both NBC and CBS on a regular basis. And while Tetley played a smart-alecky brat on all the dozens of show in which he appeared, he did it with perfect comedic timing.

Tetley and Gildersleeve both had impeccable timing. This is especially true of Tetley, who was actually quite older than he appeared to be (there's a story out there that says his mother actually had him castrated so that he could play child parts forever and keep bringing in the money.)

Leroy loved to catch his uncle doing anything that wasn't quite appropriate for an elected official to do and would almost always call him out on it, publicly or privately. Leroy's enjoyment of doing this flustered Gildy so badly he would often clamor, "Hmfph oh! Lee-eee-eee-roy...." -- much to the delight of the studio and listening audience.

One time, Leroy and Gildy had planned a trip -- but right before time to go, Gildersleeve's fleeting flame Lila would coerce "Throcky" into taking her shopping because her car was not running.

"I'll give you anything you want, Leroy", Gildy would beg, "If I can just break our date!"

"Anything, Unc?" This would allow Leroy to victimize the gigantic pants off of Gildersleeve, something he did with regularity.

Whenever Gildersleeve would be caught in a faux pas, Leroy would joyfully say, "What a character!" , right to his uncle's face. Somehow, Leroy got away with saying and doing all kinds of little naughty things like this. He was picked up by the police, he got into fights, he harassed the younger neighbor kid. He'd con kids out of their skates and brand-new magic sets. Boil it down and you find Leroy was a Tom Sawyer-type kid but with the wit of no radio character before him (and aside from Arnold Stang and Groucho Marx, none after him.) He was aware of the fun of manipulation and the power of psychology. He was not a bad boy or a delinquent, by any stretch of the imagination. It was just that inside of him was both a conniving con man and a rogue tattletale yet paradoxically, he was also an assailable, breakable, fatherless child.

If Gildy had a plan, Leroy was there to destroy it. Gildersleeve realized soon after moving in with the two kids that Leroy was going to be someone he would have to keep an eye on. Leroy often ran amok and had the audience enjoying it right along with him. Though it was easy for the audience to like Gildersleeve, Leroy made it even more fun to see Gildersleeve fail. This might be because he was big -- no, make that great. The Great Gildersleeve. And there is some sort of Freudian joy in seeing a big man fall. Leroy was the perfect foil (of many) for the pear-shaped Casanova GIldersleeve.

The verbal rapport between the two seemed natural.  They were not  about taking turns telling jokes or puns, nor was one setting up the other for a big punch line.  They would have been one of the greatest - maybe THE greatest comedy team in history had they had actually become one -- the resonance between the two simply seemed real.  And when you get two real characters together, you often find magic.

Though the two characters did not have a father and son relationship, it was obvious that the two loved each other.  There were no arguments that ended with, "You're not my father! or "You're not my son!"  Leroy actually needed the stern hand of Gildy and oddly, Gildy needed to be brought down to earth by the constant vigil of Leroy.   Both lived up to each other's needs and this is what made The Great Gildersleeve seem real and fun.  

Of course all of that came to an abrupt end when Peary left NBC for CBS.  Everyone else seemed to be jumping the NBC ship and Gildy wanted the big money that CBS was handing out, too.  It backfired - maybe one of the biggest backfires in show business history as Peary thought the show would go with him.    Kraft, the sponsor, had a long relationship with NBC and declined the move.  Peary and Tetley were no longer part of the same family anymore.

Each went their different ways and each was successful, albeit, Tetley more so than Peary.  But neither found another like each other again.   Magic, after all, doesn't last forever.

©Jimbo 2010/2011

Assorted photo dump

Fibber/Molly

Walter Tetley and Harold Peary in the way I imagine them

Norman McDonnell and William Conrad

Harry von Zell

Fairly unexciting photo dump/March 30th

Arthur Treacher

This is a very large picture of Bing Crosby.  Click to enlarge.

Bob Burns - his bazooka and unkowns

Don Ameche

Fred Allen and Portland

Odd angle photo of Harold Peary and his wife

An interview with Harold Peary

I listened to an interview with Harold Peary last night that took place in the early 1970's.  I took some notes and thought I would share with you some fascinating items:

• Most of the origin of the Great Gildersleeve program came from Peary himself.  Though he was married, he was also raising a nephew and a niece and had "a colored house-keeper named, 'Birdie' "
• Though the audition was sponsored by Johnson's Wax, Mr. S.C. Johnson did not like the program and refused to buy it.  One month later, Kraft Foods bought the program.
• Lillian Randolph (Birdie) was also Madame Queen on Amos 'n' Andy.
• Lurene Tuttle was in her early 30's while playing Marjorie and was embarrassed to do so.
• Una Murkel played the part of Lila Ransome for a short time while Shirley Mitchell had a baby.
• The first year of the Great Gildersleeve program saw them pitted against Elenor Roosevelt on CBS - and beat her out by almost 3 rating points!
• In the 1930's Chicago was the center of radio production, not Los Angeles or New York.
• On the Tom Mix show, he played 7 different characters.
• Peary often played the part of the dog on Little Orphan Annie and Tom Mix.
• It was Peary who did the voice for Gooey Fooey on Fibber McGee and Molly.
• When Peary lived in Chicago, the name of the street he lived on was called, "Throckmorten" and suggested this name to writer Don Quinn.

©Jimbo 2010/2011

Extremely rare: Gildersleeve rehearsal (cast) photo

1948

Right after Harold Peary left NBC for CBS

Harold Peary and Shirley Mitchell - photo rarities!

©Jimbo 2010/2011

Lighten up, world... Gildy says: It's okay to smoke

Please say you got the pun in the title!