Fibber McGee and Molly

About Fibber McGee and Molly

152 complete radio episodes (78 hours) from 1931 to 1944, across 1 series:

• Fibber McGee and Molly: 152 episodes, 1931–1944

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.

Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio

NBC Radio, 1935-1959. With Harold Peary, Bill Thompson, Gale Gordon, Arthur Q. Bryan.

• Fibber McGee and Molly premiered on NBC on April 16, 1935. It ran as a weekly series until 1953, as a daily show until 1956, and in short sketches until 1959.
• Jim Jordan and Marian Driscoll were both from Peoria, Illinois. They met at choir practice in their Catholic church and married on August 31, 1918.
• Five days after the wedding, Jim Jordan got his draft notice. He went to France and ended up in a military touring group that entertained the troops after World War I.
• Back home, Jim and Marian Jordan went into vaudeville. By 1923 they were stranded and broke in Lincoln, Illinois, with two small children, and their parents had to wire money to get them home.
• The Jordans got into radio in 1924 on a $10 bet. Jim's brother bet him they couldn't do better than a singing act on the air, and by the end of the evening they had their first radio contract.
• Their first radio job paid $10 a show, as The O'Henry Twins for Oh Henry! candy.
• In the late 1920s, on a Chicago farm-report program called Luke and Mirandy, Jim Jordan played a farmer who told tall tales and face-saving lies, a first sketch of Fibber.
• Don Quinn had tried to be a cartoonist, but he noticed that magazines threw away his drawings and kept his captions. He turned to writing instead and met the Jordans at Chicago's WENR in 1931.
• The Jordans treated writer Don Quinn as a full partner and split their pay with him. By 1941 the three were splitting a $6,000 paycheck three ways.
• The Jordans' first hit with Quinn was Smackout, a daily 15-minute show about a store owner who told tall tales and was always "smack out" of whatever customers wanted.
• Smackout was based on a real Missouri shopkeeper whose store was full of stock but who claimed to be "smack out" of everything anyone asked for.
• On Smackout, Marian Jordan voiced 69 different characters. NBC carried the show nationally from 1933 to 1935.

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