THE JIMMY DURANTE SHOWProgram Guide by Elizabeth McLeod

One of the great advantages of being a radio star in the medium’s Golden Era was the relative anonymity it afforded. A performer might entertain tens of millions of listeners every week, and yet walk the streets in broad daylight without being annoyed by fans. In radio it was the voices, not the faces, that mattered. But there were exceptions.

Some radio favorites had a background in stage or film, and their faces were part and parcel of their appeal. Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, and even Fred Allen had physical attributes that matched their voices…and made them easy to pick out in any crowd. And there was no performer who could boast a more perfect match of face and voice -- or was more instantly recognizable -- than the beloved Old Schnozzola, Jimmy Durante.

In a career that extended from the first decade of the 20th Century to the 1970s, Jimmy Durante had two trademarks that transcended every medium in which he worked. Whether you knew him from his nightclub act, motion pictures, phonograph records, radio programs, or television, you needed no master of

ceremonies to tell you who he was. All you needed was a glimpse of that magnificent proboscis -- or hear a short snatch of that unforgettable rasping voice -- and you knew exactly what was coming. You were in for a distinctive blend of raucous slapstick and aggressive wordplay, overlaid with just a touch of lovable sentimentality. Durante was, as he often declared, “one in a million.”

Jimmy Durante is not a per-former remembered first and foremost as a radio star, no

CD 4A: Vacations - March 24, 1948B: Guest: Rose Marie – March 31, 1948

CD 5A: Guest: Dorothy Lamour – April 7,1948B: Guest: President Harry Truman – April 14, 1948

CD 6A: Guest: Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson – April 21, 1948B: Guest: Lucille Ball – April 28, 1948

CD 7A: Transportation Problems – May 5, 1948B: A President’s Wife – May 12, 1948

CD 8A: The Small Businessman – May 19, 1948B: Choice Of Champions – May 26, 1948

Elizabeth McLeod is a journalist, author, and broadcast historian. She received the 2005 Ray Stanich Award for excellence in broadcasting history research from the Friends Of Old Time Radio.

www.RadioSpirits.comPO Box 1315, Little Falls, NJ 07424

© 2017 RSPT LLC. All rights reserved. For home use only.Unauthorized distribution prohibited.

Program Guide © 2017 Elizabeth McLeod and RSPT LLC.All Rights Reserved.

47322

Lucille Ball

2 7

doubt because he was so pervasive in every form of show business. And oddly, for a performer whose voice was such a distinctive part of his persona, he didn’t achieve his greatest radio success until late in the medium’s development. He only emerged as a microphone favorite during World War II, and his popularity in the medium lasted less than a decade. He rushed headlong into television in the early 1950s, without looking back. But what it lacked in longevity, Durante’s radio work certainly made up for in laughs.

Durante sounded, acted, and looked for all the world like a caricature of a rough-scrabble New York street urchin -- and that is exactly what he was. Born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1893, little Jimmy was known for the remarkable size of his nose before he was out of short pants. This distinctive feature helped him to stand out from the legion of dancing-for-pennies street kids then rampant in the neighborhood, but it was his musical talent that really got him his start in show business. As a child he was swept up by the ragtime music craze. Although he had no formal instruction on the piano, he had a flawless ear and soon picked up the fundamentals of ragtime technique. By the time he was twelve years old, he was skilled enough to quit school and pursue music as a fulltime career.

Music was everywhere in the New York of the early 1900s. Saloons, restaurants, beer gardens, and brothels all provided a bouncy musical soundtrack for their customers. Pianists were especially in demand, and Durante never wanted for work. He grew to manhood in this environment -- always playing, always laughing and, increasingly, always singing and joking. It was while playing a joint in Harlem called the Alamo that he met a fellow performer who’d become a lifelong crony. Eddie Jackson (below) was a singing waiter at the club, and shared Durante’s taste for lowbrow clowning. After years of knocking around together, Durante and Jackson decided to open their own club.

It was 1923, and Prohibition extended its bony arm across the land. The drought, however, only extended as far as the nearest speakeasy. In the basement of a building on West 58th Street, the Club Durant offered an intimate dining, drinking, and dancing experience (with a seating capacity of less than 150). The Durant lasted about a year and a half before the Prohibition agents put a slug in the lock. But that

getting up in years, and as he moved through his sixties he focused more on guest-star spots than on a program of his own. He became a popular Las Vegas stage attraction and, during the 1960s, alternated stage work with selected TV and movie appearances. In 1968, he endeared himself forever to Baby Boomers as the host/narrator of the perennial holiday TV classic Frosty The Snowman. A stroke in 1972 finally forced his retirement, and he passed away in 1980.

Jimmy Durante was eulogized for his charity work, his dynamic stage presence, and his unique way with a song. His radio work, if mentioned at all, was just a footnote to his long career. But as this collection of his broadcasts will well attest, radio did much to capture the unmistakable charisma of this unique and beloved performer.

THE REXALL DRUG COMPANYpresents

THE JIMMY DURANTE SHOW

FeaturingArthur Treacher, Victor Moore, Candy Candido, and Peggy Lee

Howard Petrie announcing

Produced and directed byPhil Cohan

CD 1A: Guest: Victor Moore – December 17, 1947B: Jimmy Returns After Illness – January 28, 1948

CD 2A: Courtin’ Cora Bell – February 4, 1948B: Going To Ciro’s – February 18, 1948

CD 3A: Jimmy Goes To The Race Track –February 25, 1948B: Guest: Van Johnson – March 10, 1948

Victor MooreEddie Jackson and Jimmy Durante

6 3

Show, mournful-voiced stage veteran Victor Moore became a regular, allowing for the creation of a new “Durante and Moore” team.

Cohan understood that an entirely unrestrained Durante would be too much to feed an audience for half an hour every week -- but Durante as the comic head of a varied ensemble made for enjoyable listening. A new feature of the revamped series was a slant toward topical comedy. While Durante was never in the league of Fred Allen as a comic observer of the passing parade, his series of 1947-48 skits parodying developments in the news offered a fresh field for his humor, and ample space for his sidekicks to offer their own specialties.

Rexall carried the program until the end of the 1947-48 season, when Justin Dart decided that Phil Harris was funnier. Camel picked up the program again for the new season, and would carry it for the rest of Durante’s radio run. Cohan stuck to his basic format regardless of sponsorship, and when Victor Moore moved on, Cohen brought in Alan Young. His style failed to mesh with Durante’s, however, so Cohen turned to Don Ameche to play Durante’s regular foil. Other comic stooges came along as well, including Barbara Jo Allen (below) as “Vera Vague” and Florence Halop as a Brooklyn sexpot called “Hotbreath Houlihan.”

Perhaps the most notable feature of Durante’s later radio career was his mysterious signoff. During his run with Garry Moore, Durante began closing his performances each week with a strange and wistful aside, murmuring into a close microphone over the final theme music. “Good night, Mrs. Calabash,” he’d say. “Good night.” Eventually, this evolved into its more familiar “Good night, Mrs. Calabash -- wherever you are.” Speculation raged over Mrs. Calabash’s true identity, with Durante feeding the speculation when it suited him, and denying it when it didn’t. Both Cohan and Moore told interviewers that the phrase was merely a gimmick, cooked up as an attention-getting catchphrase and named

after Cohan’s calabash pipe. But Durante himself had a different story -- claiming that “Mrs. Calabash” was a pet name for his first wife Jeanne, who’d died in early 1943. Whatever its origin, Durante would use the phrase from 1945 until the end of his career.

Television was made for a performer with Jimmy Durante’s visual energy, and he jumped into it whole-souled in 1950, presenting wild adaptations of his old nightclub routines as one of several rotating hosts of the Four Star Revue variety program. But he was also

was long enough for Durante and Jackson to take on a third partner. A two-fisted soft-shoe dancer named Lou Clayton had walked in for a drink one night and stuck around to join the floor show.

The team of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante developed a routine specializing in snappy, comic novelty songs, clever dancing, and broad, physical slapstick comedy. The trio moved from club to club, refining and developing its routines -- culminating in the famous “Wood” number, in which Durante portrayed a man so obsessed with wooden objects that he felt compelled to destroy them. This routine ended with Durante tearing up the stage and demolishing the piano barehanded. This finale grew more outrageous with every performance and never failed to (figuratively speaking) bring down the house.

It was during these years that Durante and his partners made their radio debuts. The Parody Club, an establishment where they cut a broad swath during 1927, had a radio wire -- and broadcast its floor show on a regular basis over station WMCA. What listeners actually heard on these occasions is lost to the ages, but it was undoubtedly quite unlike anything else then presented over the generally dignified air. These broadcasts proved just a short detour for the trio as they turned to bigger money in vaudeville and on the Broadway revue stage. Clayton, Jackson and Durante provided high-powered laughs in Show Girl and The New Yorkers -- but Broadway crashed with the stock market and, by 1931, the act was unable to find work. The three friends were forced to go their separate ways.

For the first time in nearly a decade, Durante was again a solo performer and he kept bread on the table with talking pictures and radio. Clayton, Jackson and Durante had a brief stint in movies in 1930, but Hollywood wasn’t quite sure what to do with Jimmy as a solo act. In 1932, he landed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he was teamed with silent screen legend Buster Keaton (below). Keaton had fallen out of favor with the studio because of his drinking and his difficult adjustment to talkies. When Metro producer Lawrence Weingarten decided to package him with Durante as a comedy team, Keaton had little to say about the idea. The comic styles of the two men couldn’t have been more different. Keaton made three films with Durante before MGM dropped the fading genius and kept Durante as Jimmy Durante and Buster KeatonBarbra Jo "Vera Vague" Allen

4 5

That future came sooner than he thought. Another Camel program, The Abbott and Costello Show, was thrown into chaos in March of 1943 when Costello developed a severe case of rheumatic fever. Abbott refused to perform without his partner, forcing the sponsor to come up with a substitute program. Thinking fast, Cohan pitched a Durante-Moore package, and then set to work assembling one. To the surprise of all involved, it proved to be the smash comedy hit of the season.

Cohan’s format developed a workable air character around Durante’s established personality. He was presented as a madcap force of nature kept in check only by Moore, a bemused presence who challenged Durante’s wild tales. The on-air relationship wasn’t quite that of a conventional comedian and straight man -- both got their share of laughs. But the contrasting comic sensibilities of the two men played off of each other so well that the sheer unlikeliness of their teaming made them an effective team. This quality was helped along by the fact that Durante and Moore developed a genuine affection for each other above and beyond their working relationship, and the warmth in their exchanges transcended the occasional corniness of the scripts.

Camel dropped the show in 1945, but the Rexall Drug Company picked it up for the new season. Despite the fact that Rexall president Justin Dart didn’t think Durante was funny, he was willing to go along with what radio audiences wanted, and The Durante and Moore Show enjoyed two more successful seasons under the Rexall banner. Then, in 1947, Garry Moore decided that he wanted to return to his solo career. The split was friendly -- Moore and Durante remained friends for the rest of their lives -- but Moore simply felt the time was right to move on. Once again, Durante would go it alone.

With Rexall’s blessing, Cohan wisely left the basic structure of the format intact, with Moore’s role as Durante’s foil to be filled by an ever-changing mixture of guest stars and stooge characters. Novelty singer Candy Candido, English character actor Arthur Treacher, vocalist Peggy Lee, and announcer Howard Petrie all took turns in these roles -- with an interesting assortment of Hollywood favorites filling the guest-star slots. Early in the run of the new Jimmy Durante

a supporting player. He would be added as comic seasoning to a variety of films during the mid-1930s.

It was during this period that Durante took his first serious dip into radio. Eddie Cantor’s Chase and Sanborn Hour was a foundation stone of Sunday night listening in the early 1930s, but the comedian insisted on taking breaks from time to time to continue his movie career. Various guest hosts took over the show during these intervals and, in the fall of 1933, Durante enjoyed a successful six-week run as Cantor’s replacement. His combination of rambunctious slapstick and comic singing fit nicely into the program’s format, and he was asked back the following year.

In 1935, Durante made a triumphant New York comeback in producer Billy Rose’s lavish stage musical Jumbo, and his portrayal of hustling promoter “Brainy Bowers” landed him his next radio job. The Texas Company had just concluded a successful run with Ed Wynn as the star of its Tuesday night program, and decided that a radio version of Jumbo (with stage cast intact) offered a worthy follow up. But Texaco little reckoned the cost of such a production, broadcast every Tuesday live from the stage of the Hippodrome Theatre. Durante’s performance was subdued by his need to carry forward a dramatic plot and, without his physical antics to carry the bulk of the comedy, he fell flat. The Jumbo Fire Chief Program only lasted twelve weeks before Durante was canned. It would be his last major radio work for the next seven years.

Durante remained a stage favorite during that interval, but the air of failure that hung about the Jumbo program kept radio sponsors away. Durante seemed fated to end up like Groucho Marx and Milton Berle -- brash, aggressive comics who were just too boisterous to fit into the more intimate style of comedy preferred by radio. But producer Phil Cohan disagreed.

Cohan was a longtime hand around CBS Hollywood who, in 1943, found himself producing a weekly variety hour for Camel cigarettes, called The Camel Caravan. Durante was booked as a guest star and performed with his usual rowdy flair, oblivious to the presence of a trim young man with a flat-top haircut who called himself Garry Moore (right). Moore, born Thomas Garrison Morfit, had been knocking around radio as a general master of ceremonies and light comedian for several years without attracting any significant attention. But he had a snappy, rather sophisticated microphone presence that Cohan thought offered a sharp contrast to Durante’s genial anarchy. Resourceful producer that he was, Cohan filed that thought away for future reference.

Garry Moore and Jimmy Durante

4 5

That future came sooner than he thought. Another Camel program, The Abbott and Costello Show, was thrown into chaos in March of 1943 when Costello developed a severe case of rheumatic fever. Abbott refused to perform without his partner, forcing the sponsor to come up with a substitute program. Thinking fast, Cohan pitched a Durante-Moore package, and then set to work assembling one. To the surprise of all involved, it proved to be the smash comedy hit of the season.

Cohan’s format developed a workable air character around Durante’s established personality. He was presented as a madcap force of nature kept in check only by Moore, a bemused presence who challenged Durante’s wild tales. The on-air relationship wasn’t quite that of a conventional comedian and straight man -- both got their share of laughs. But the contrasting comic sensibilities of the two men played off of each other so well that the sheer unlikeliness of their teaming made them an effective team. This quality was helped along by the fact that Durante and Moore developed a genuine affection for each other above and beyond their working relationship, and the warmth in their exchanges transcended the occasional corniness of the scripts.

Camel dropped the show in 1945, but the Rexall Drug Company picked it up for the new season. Despite the fact that Rexall president Justin Dart didn’t think Durante was funny, he was willing to go along with what radio audiences wanted, and The Durante and Moore Show enjoyed two more successful seasons under the Rexall banner. Then, in 1947, Garry Moore decided that he wanted to return to his solo career. The split was friendly -- Moore and Durante remained friends for the rest of their lives -- but Moore simply felt the time was right to move on. Once again, Durante would go it alone.

With Rexall’s blessing, Cohan wisely left the basic structure of the format intact, with Moore’s role as Durante’s foil to be filled by an ever-changing mixture of guest stars and stooge characters. Novelty singer Candy Candido, English character actor Arthur Treacher, vocalist Peggy Lee, and announcer Howard Petrie all took turns in these roles -- with an interesting assortment of Hollywood favorites filling the guest-star slots. Early in the run of the new Jimmy Durante

a supporting player. He would be added as comic seasoning to a variety of films during the mid-1930s.

It was during this period that Durante took his first serious dip into radio. Eddie Cantor’s Chase and Sanborn Hour was a foundation stone of Sunday night listening in the early 1930s, but the comedian insisted on taking breaks from time to time to continue his movie career. Various guest hosts took over the show during these intervals and, in the fall of 1933, Durante enjoyed a successful six-week run as Cantor’s replacement. His combination of rambunctious slapstick and comic singing fit nicely into the program’s format, and he was asked back the following year.

In 1935, Durante made a triumphant New York comeback in producer Billy Rose’s lavish stage musical Jumbo, and his portrayal of hustling promoter “Brainy Bowers” landed him his next radio job. The Texas Company had just concluded a successful run with Ed Wynn as the star of its Tuesday night program, and decided that a radio version of Jumbo (with stage cast intact) offered a worthy follow up. But Texaco little reckoned the cost of such a production, broadcast every Tuesday live from the stage of the Hippodrome Theatre. Durante’s performance was subdued by his need to carry forward a dramatic plot and, without his physical antics to carry the bulk of the comedy, he fell flat. The Jumbo Fire Chief Program only lasted twelve weeks before Durante was canned. It would be his last major radio work for the next seven years.

Durante remained a stage favorite during that interval, but the air of failure that hung about the Jumbo program kept radio sponsors away. Durante seemed fated to end up like Groucho Marx and Milton Berle -- brash, aggressive comics who were just too boisterous to fit into the more intimate style of comedy preferred by radio. But producer Phil Cohan disagreed.

Cohan was a longtime hand around CBS Hollywood who, in 1943, found himself producing a weekly variety hour for Camel cigarettes, called The Camel Caravan. Durante was booked as a guest star and performed with his usual rowdy flair, oblivious to the presence of a trim young man with a flat-top haircut who called himself Garry Moore (right). Moore, born Thomas Garrison Morfit, had been knocking around radio as a general master of ceremonies and light comedian for several years without attracting any significant attention. But he had a snappy, rather sophisticated microphone presence that Cohan thought offered a sharp contrast to Durante’s genial anarchy. Resourceful producer that he was, Cohan filed that thought away for future reference.

Garry Moore and Jimmy Durante

6 3

Show, mournful-voiced stage veteran Victor Moore became a regular, allowing for the creation of a new “Durante and Moore” team.

Cohan understood that an entirely unrestrained Durante would be too much to feed an audience for half an hour every week -- but Durante as the comic head of a varied ensemble made for enjoyable listening. A new feature of the revamped series was a slant toward topical comedy. While Durante was never in the league of Fred Allen as a comic observer of the passing parade, his series of 1947-48 skits parodying developments in the news offered a fresh field for his humor, and ample space for his sidekicks to offer their own specialties.

Rexall carried the program until the end of the 1947-48 season, when Justin Dart decided that Phil Harris was funnier. Camel picked up the program again for the new season, and would carry it for the rest of Durante’s radio run. Cohan stuck to his basic format regardless of sponsorship, and when Victor Moore moved on, Cohen brought in Alan Young. His style failed to mesh with Durante’s, however, so Cohen turned to Don Ameche to play Durante’s regular foil. Other comic stooges came along as well, including Barbara Jo Allen (below) as “Vera Vague” and Florence Halop as a Brooklyn sexpot called “Hotbreath Houlihan.”

Perhaps the most notable feature of Durante’s later radio career was his mysterious signoff. During his run with Garry Moore, Durante began closing his performances each week with a strange and wistful aside, murmuring into a close microphone over the final theme music. “Good night, Mrs. Calabash,” he’d say. “Good night.” Eventually, this evolved into its more familiar “Good night, Mrs. Calabash -- wherever you are.” Speculation raged over Mrs. Calabash’s true identity, with Durante feeding the speculation when it suited him, and denying it when it didn’t. Both Cohan and Moore told interviewers that the phrase was merely a gimmick, cooked up as an attention-getting catchphrase and named

after Cohan’s calabash pipe. But Durante himself had a different story -- claiming that “Mrs. Calabash” was a pet name for his first wife Jeanne, who’d died in early 1943. Whatever its origin, Durante would use the phrase from 1945 until the end of his career.

Television was made for a performer with Jimmy Durante’s visual energy, and he jumped into it whole-souled in 1950, presenting wild adaptations of his old nightclub routines as one of several rotating hosts of the Four Star Revue variety program. But he was also

was long enough for Durante and Jackson to take on a third partner. A two-fisted soft-shoe dancer named Lou Clayton had walked in for a drink one night and stuck around to join the floor show.

The team of Clayton, Jackson, and Durante developed a routine specializing in snappy, comic novelty songs, clever dancing, and broad, physical slapstick comedy. The trio moved from club to club, refining and developing its routines -- culminating in the famous “Wood” number, in which Durante portrayed a man so obsessed with wooden objects that he felt compelled to destroy them. This routine ended with Durante tearing up the stage and demolishing the piano barehanded. This finale grew more outrageous with every performance and never failed to (figuratively speaking) bring down the house.

It was during these years that Durante and his partners made their radio debuts. The Parody Club, an establishment where they cut a broad swath during 1927, had a radio wire -- and broadcast its floor show on a regular basis over station WMCA. What listeners actually heard on these occasions is lost to the ages, but it was undoubtedly quite unlike anything else then presented over the generally dignified air. These broadcasts proved just a short detour for the trio as they turned to bigger money in vaudeville and on the Broadway revue stage. Clayton, Jackson and Durante provided high-powered laughs in Show Girl and The New Yorkers -- but Broadway crashed with the stock market and, by 1931, the act was unable to find work. The three friends were forced to go their separate ways.

For the first time in nearly a decade, Durante was again a solo performer and he kept bread on the table with talking pictures and radio. Clayton, Jackson and Durante had a brief stint in movies in 1930, but Hollywood wasn’t quite sure what to do with Jimmy as a solo act. In 1932, he landed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he was teamed with silent screen legend Buster Keaton (below). Keaton had fallen out of favor with the studio because of his drinking and his difficult adjustment to talkies. When Metro producer Lawrence Weingarten decided to package him with Durante as a comedy team, Keaton had little to say about the idea. The comic styles of the two men couldn’t have been more different. Keaton made three films with Durante before MGM dropped the fading genius and kept Durante as Jimmy Durante and Buster KeatonBarbra Jo "Vera Vague" Allen

2 7

doubt because he was so pervasive in every form of show business. And oddly, for a performer whose voice was such a distinctive part of his persona, he didn’t achieve his greatest radio success until late in the medium’s development. He only emerged as a microphone favorite during World War II, and his popularity in the medium lasted less than a decade. He rushed headlong into television in the early 1950s, without looking back. But what it lacked in longevity, Durante’s radio work certainly made up for in laughs.

Durante sounded, acted, and looked for all the world like a caricature of a rough-scrabble New York street urchin -- and that is exactly what he was. Born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1893, little Jimmy was known for the remarkable size of his nose before he was out of short pants. This distinctive feature helped him to stand out from the legion of dancing-for-pennies street kids then rampant in the neighborhood, but it was his musical talent that really got him his start in show business. As a child he was swept up by the ragtime music craze. Although he had no formal instruction on the piano, he had a flawless ear and soon picked up the fundamentals of ragtime technique. By the time he was twelve years old, he was skilled enough to quit school and pursue music as a fulltime career.

Music was everywhere in the New York of the early 1900s. Saloons, restaurants, beer gardens, and brothels all provided a bouncy musical soundtrack for their customers. Pianists were especially in demand, and Durante never wanted for work. He grew to manhood in this environment -- always playing, always laughing and, increasingly, always singing and joking. It was while playing a joint in Harlem called the Alamo that he met a fellow performer who’d become a lifelong crony. Eddie Jackson (below) was a singing waiter at the club, and shared Durante’s taste for lowbrow clowning. After years of knocking around together, Durante and Jackson decided to open their own club.

It was 1923, and Prohibition extended its bony arm across the land. The drought, however, only extended as far as the nearest speakeasy. In the basement of a building on West 58th Street, the Club Durant offered an intimate dining, drinking, and dancing experience (with a seating capacity of less than 150). The Durant lasted about a year and a half before the Prohibition agents put a slug in the lock. But that

getting up in years, and as he moved through his sixties he focused more on guest-star spots than on a program of his own. He became a popular Las Vegas stage attraction and, during the 1960s, alternated stage work with selected TV and movie appearances. In 1968, he endeared himself forever to Baby Boomers as the host/narrator of the perennial holiday TV classic Frosty The Snowman. A stroke in 1972 finally forced his retirement, and he passed away in 1980.

Jimmy Durante was eulogized for his charity work, his dynamic stage presence, and his unique way with a song. His radio work, if mentioned at all, was just a footnote to his long career. But as this collection of his broadcasts will well attest, radio did much to capture the unmistakable charisma of this unique and beloved performer.

THE REXALL DRUG COMPANYpresents

THE JIMMY DURANTE SHOW

FeaturingArthur Treacher, Victor Moore, Candy Candido, and Peggy Lee

Howard Petrie announcing

Produced and directed byPhil Cohan

CD 1A: Guest: Victor Moore – December 17, 1947B: Jimmy Returns After Illness – January 28, 1948

CD 2A: Courtin’ Cora Bell – February 4, 1948B: Going To Ciro’s – February 18, 1948

CD 3A: Jimmy Goes To The Race Track –February 25, 1948B: Guest: Van Johnson – March 10, 1948

Victor MooreEddie Jackson and Jimmy Durante

THE JIMMY DURANTE SHOWProgram Guide by Elizabeth McLeod

One of the great advantages of being a radio star in the medium’s Golden Era was the relative anonymity it afforded. A performer might entertain tens of millions of listeners every week, and yet walk the streets in broad daylight without being annoyed by fans. In radio it was the voices, not the faces, that mattered. But there were exceptions.

Some radio favorites had a background in stage or film, and their faces were part and parcel of their appeal. Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, and even Fred Allen had physical attributes that matched their voices…and made them easy to pick out in any crowd. And there was no performer who could boast a more perfect match of face and voice -- or was more instantly recognizable -- than the beloved Old Schnozzola, Jimmy Durante.

In a career that extended from the first decade of the 20th Century to the 1970s, Jimmy Durante had two trademarks that transcended every medium in which he worked. Whether you knew him from his nightclub act, motion pictures, phonograph records, radio programs, or television, you needed no master of

ceremonies to tell you who he was. All you needed was a glimpse of that magnificent proboscis -- or hear a short snatch of that unforgettable rasping voice -- and you knew exactly what was coming. You were in for a distinctive blend of raucous slapstick and aggressive wordplay, overlaid with just a touch of lovable sentimentality. Durante was, as he often declared, “one in a million.”

Jimmy Durante is not a per-former remembered first and foremost as a radio star, no

CD 4A: Vacations - March 24, 1948B: Guest: Rose Marie – March 31, 1948

CD 5A: Guest: Dorothy Lamour – April 7,1948B: Guest: President Harry Truman – April 14, 1948

CD 6A: Guest: Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson – April 21, 1948B: Guest: Lucille Ball – April 28, 1948

CD 7A: Transportation Problems – May 5, 1948B: A President’s Wife – May 12, 1948

CD 8A: The Small Businessman – May 19, 1948B: Choice Of Champions – May 26, 1948

Elizabeth McLeod is a journalist, author, and broadcast historian. She received the 2005 Ray Stanich Award for excellence in broadcasting history research from the Friends Of Old Time Radio.

www.RadioSpirits.comPO Box 1315, Little Falls, NJ 07424

© 2017 RSPT LLC. All rights reserved. For home use only.Unauthorized distribution prohibited.

Program Guide © 2017 Elizabeth McLeod and RSPT LLC.All Rights Reserved.

47322

Lucille Ball