Shirley Mitchell (Alice Darling) cheesecake photo

Actress Shirley Mitchell

If you've ever wondered what Shirley Mitchell looked like on video, wonder no more:

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

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

Rare Great Gilderleeve stuff (including second fiddle Eve Goodwin!)

Lil 'ol Shirley Mitchell

Radio war propoganda

My friend 'Boston Blackie'  continues to be crucial to this blog with his always- clever suggestions.  This is another of his ideas.



Jimbo: Shows during the war featured lots of propaganda.  Is there any show or shows that stick for you where you have noticed a lot of propaganda?

Boston Blackie:  In terms of old time radio the first impression about the war was the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.  I recall the recordings of shows that were interrupted by the announcement that Pearl Harbor was attacked by air.  They were truly memorable recordings.  I wanted to make this statement first.  Then as the war continued on we got into the propaganda that was expressed in the shows.  The one that I felt made the most of this type of thing was the Fibber McGee & Molly Show.  They had lots of references to ‘Japs; and ‘Nazis’ in the show.  I may be wrong on this, but, my memory seems to stick the comedy shows presenting the most propaganda than the drama or detective shows.  I think it fit in better into their format than the other types of shows.

Jimbo: What you say is true.  Comedy shows were ripe with propaganda.  Fibber McGee and Molly is certainly the comedy show with the most propaganda.  But you also had The Great Gildersleeve, Red Skelton, Abbott and Costello - and to some extent, Jack Benny Show, Burns and Allen and some others.

Abbott and Costello had the harshest humor of all when it came to the Axis.

Boston Blackie:  I can’t speak about Abbott and Costello, but, I think that Fibber McGee & Molly were also harsh in their remarks about the ‘Japs’ and slanted eyes, etc. I think shows like Burns and Allen were more on emphasizing the war effort than demeaning or degrading our war enemies.  They pushed War Bonds and Victory Gardens.  I can recall Gracie many times referring to their Victory Gardens out back.  Shows also expressed concern about saving cooking fats and returning the fats to the butchers.  The fats then were recycled to produce explosives.  The Great Gildersleeve often talked about helping the war effort by purchasing War Bonds. 

Jimbo:  And shows like Guest Star were devoted to War Bond promotion during the war.

For those who don't know, Victory Gardens were gardens suggested by the government to provide more food stateside so that more food could be sent overseas.

You being the wise one that you are probably already know this, but the government encouraged people to plant gardens in public parks.

There was also the "don't travel if you have to", "don't drive to save rubber on your tires" (!!) and "don't buy anything you don't absolutely need."  Those must have been some tough times!

Boston Blackie:  The recycling of aluminum is another one promoted during the war.  My mother would have us kids save the wrapper around gum and peel off the tin foil.  We would create big balls of tin foil from the gum wrappers and then my mother would turn them in.  Of course there was gas rationing as well.  All these things were mentioned during the Fibber McGee & Molly shows.  It was the war effort, they would say.

In addition to the above ways of fighting the war other shows presented story lines about the Nazi’s or the ‘Japs.’  One of the story lines for Superman was fighting the wartime enemies.  The Shadow often set out to find counter spies.  The Green Hornet did the same thing.  Of course there was This Is Your FBI and the FBI in Peace and War which devoted a few shows about fighting the war.

Jimbo: There was also the whole "black market" warnings and many shows were devoted to this subject.  I remember one specific one on Fibber McGee and Molly but other shows with a similar theme can be found on Boston Blackie, This is Your FBI, The Green Hornet and many Lum and Abner episodes, just to name a few.

Boston Blackie:  You are right about that.  If you recall there were several episodes of Fibber McGee & Molly which they boarded a young girl who worked at a war factory.  She was sort of a ‘Rosie the Riveter’ personality.  That story line allowed for additional war propaganda for the show. Also, let us not forget about the songs that were played on the radio during the war years.  So many of the songs related to our boys overseas and the girls left behind.  The Andrew Sisters were big on this and so was Vera Lynn.  There was a song where Bing Crosby sang about there will be a hot time in old Berlin when the Brooklyn boys get there.  The name of the song was “Will Be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlin” with the Andrews Sisters.  Problem was, the Russians got there first.

Jimbo:  Shirley Mitchell played the part of Alice Darling, the aircraft war plant worker who stayed with the McGees for a while.

And wow I am glad you brought that up about music, as Spike Jones had a big hit with, "Der Fuehrer's Face" , which is quite a funny song.



©Jimbo 2010/2011

Photo dump/March 16th

Shirley Mitchell

©Jimbo 2010/2011

Harold Peary and Shirley Mitchell - photo rarities!

©Jimbo 2010/2011

Shirley Mitchell (Plus rare "Leila Ransome" & Gildy photo)