Duffy's Tavern

About Duffy's Tavern

159 complete radio episodes (77 hours) from 1942 to 1951, across 2 series:

• OTRR Duffy's Tavern Singles: 158 episodes, 1942–1951
• Duffy's Tavern: 1 episode

Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.

Duffy's Tavern on the radio

CBS, NBC Blue, NBC, 1941-1951. With Ed Gardner, Shirley Booth, Charlie Cantor, Florence Halop, Alan Reed.

• Duffy's Tavern ran for a decade: on CBS in 1941-42, the NBC Blue Network in 1942-44, and NBC from 1944 until its last broadcast on December 28, 1951.
• Every show opened with "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" cut off by a ringing phone, and Archie answering: "Duffy's Tavern, where the elite meet to eat."
• Duffy, the owner, was never seen or heard on the radio show, in the 1945 movie or on the 1954 TV series. Archie dealt with him over the phone.
• Archie, the manager, was always chasing get-rich-quick schemes and romance, and he mangled the language with malapropisms and mixed metaphors.
• Ed Gardner was already playing Archie and talking about Duffy's Tavern on November 9, 1939, on NBC's Good News of 1940.
• Archie was born by accident. Directing CBS's This Is New York, Gardner couldn't find an actor who sounded like a real New York mug, so he read the lines himself to demonstrate, and the control room told him to play the part.
• By most accounts Gardner's J. Walter Thompson colleague George Faulkner was the first to hear a character in that voice, and he may have been the one who named him Archie.
• Gardner was born Edward Poggenberg in Astoria, Queens, on June 29, 1901.
• At 14 Gardner played piano at O'Bryan's, a neighborhood cafe in Astoria that partly inspired Duffy's. His mother saw him through the swinging door, and that was the end of that job.
• Before show business Gardner sold pianos, typewriters and paint. Once, arrested for speeding in a Pennsylvania town, he left having sold the town an order to repaint its jail.
• Gardner had directed radio for George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice and Ripley's Believe It or Not before Duffy's Tavern made him a star.
• Duffy's Tavern was first heard on July 29, 1940, on CBS's experimental showcase Forecast, with Colonel Stoopnagle and Gertrude Niesen as the first guests.

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