As you may or may not have heard, the big G-8 Summit gets underway this week at Sea Island, Georgia—and things have really been hopping, hotelwise, here in Savannah and Brunswick. (Savannah’s quite a ways from Sea Island, but it’s playing host to most of folks from the media.) The inn that gainfully employs me is also putting up much of the security personnel, so I was tres busy last night—therefore, I apologize for the brevity of this and upcoming posts.

I took along a CD to listen to that contained three comedy programs—two of which have already been discussed here at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, The Mel Blanc Show and My Favorite Husband. The third was a November 7, 1954 broadcast of My Little Margie—which is best-remembered as an early TV sitcom hit. Nevertheless, it had an almost identical run on radio from December 7, 1952-June 26, 1955 over CBS (Jay Hickerson also notes that it was heard over Mutual from 1953-54) and is one of the few TV-to-radio transplants (the most successful being Have Gun, Will Travel, which was also on CBS Radio from 1958-60).

My Little Margie began on television as a summer replacement series for I Love Lucy (columnist Walter Winchell once remarked that while he “loved Lucy” he was “just mild about Marg”), but it moved to NBC in the fall of 1952 for a three-year run. Gale Storm, a singer-actress who co-starred in a few Roy Rogers B-westerns before Dale Evans underwent her cowgirl coronation, played Margie Albright—a young woman who resided in an apartment “high atop New York’s Fifth Avenue” with her father Vern, played by Charles Farrell. Farrell had been a one-time matinee idol, co-starring alongside Janet Gaynor in several films, the best-known being Seventh Heaven in 1927. Later, in a state of semi-retirement, he became the mayor of Palm Springs, California—and a running gag on The Jack Benny Program whenever Jack did broadcasts from there, being constantly referred to as “Charlie Farrell, star of Seventh Heaven.” (It’s all in the repetition, son.)

Because I pretty much vegetated in front of a TV set during my formative years, I had the opportunity (or misfortune, depending on your P.O.V.) to see an awful lot of My Little Margie reruns. To be honest, I don’t know how the show managed to last as long as it did—Margie was sort of a mini-Lucy (though she wasn’t married) who got involved in some weekly antic or another, and she usually managed to get her father entangled in it as well. Vern’s character was supposed to be quite the ladies’ man, but I could never figure out why women went for him—he was a bit of an old wolf, and he had this pencil-thin moustache (to this day, I think of Vern Albright whenever I hear the Jimmy Buffett tune) that I guess was supposed to turn the females on (there could have been a severe man shortage in the Big Apple back then, I’m not sure). Margie was pretty cute, with a pair of crinkly eyes and a habit of trilling “Gr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r” when ever she was in hot water. (Rick Mitz, author of The Great TV Sitcom Book, once remarked that it “sounded like she had a mouthful of spit.”)

Margie had a boyfriend named Freddie Wilson—played on TV by Don Hayden and radio by Gil Stratton, Jr.—who didn’t seem to contribute much to society outside of providing carbon dioxide for trees and plants. He was also a member of the unemployment fraternity, the same lodge to which Amos ‘n’ Andy’s George “Kingfish” Stevens and My Friend Irma’s Al belonged. On radio, Verna Felton played the prerequisite screwball neighbor, Mrs. Odetts (Gertrude Hoffman on the tube version), and veteran actor Will Wright was Mr. Honeywell, Vern’s apoplectic boss (Clarence Kolb on TV). Hillary Brooke, a regular from TV’s The Abbott & Costello Show, was also on Margie, playing Vern’s sophisticated, steady girlfriend—but her character wasn’t on the radio show much, if at all.

Last night’s episode involved Vern pretending to “adopt” Freddie—and then later learning to his horror that he actually has adopted him. But before you get panicky, it is revealed that Freddie really isn’t an Albright, he was just playing a wacky practical joke on the Vernster. (That Freddie! What a funster!) The show, of which about two dozen radio episodes are extant, isn’t going to make anyone forget I Love Lucy anytime soon—but for those of you who like to wallow in nostalgia, I think you’ll enjoy it. (There are also two DVD collections of the show available from VCI for the very curious.)
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