The Great Gildersleeve

About The Great Gildersleeve

530 complete radio episodes (261 hours) from 1941 to 1957, across 1 series:

• The Great Gildersleeve: 530 episodes, 1941–1957

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.

The Great Gildersleeve on the radio

NBC, 1941-1958. With Harold Peary, Willard Waterman, Lillian Randolph, Lurene Tuttle, Mary Lee Robb, Richard Crenna.

• The Great Gildersleeve was one of the earliest spin-offs in broadcasting, built around a character from Fibber McGee and Molly.
• Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve was introduced on Fibber McGee and Molly on October 3, 1939. Harold Peary had already played a similarly named Dr. Gildersleeve on earlier episodes.
• On Fibber, Gildersleeve was the McGees' pompous next-door neighbor, and his exasperated "You're a harrrd man, McGee!" became a catchphrase.
• A 1940 Fibber episode revealed Gildersleeve's middle name: Philharmonic.
• Johnson's Wax, Fibber McGee's sponsor, paid for the Gildersleeve audition, recorded May 16, 1941.
• The audition used the same script as the first broadcast three months later: Gildy leaves Wistful Vista to visit Summerfield and ends up staying.
• The series premiered on NBC on August 31, 1941, sponsored by Kraft to sell Parkay margarine.
• The premise: Gildersleeve moves to Summerfield to manage his late sister and brother-in-law's estate and raise their orphaned children, Marjorie and Leroy Forrester.
• Fibber listeners had heard about a Mrs. Gildersleeve, but on his own show Gildy was a confirmed bachelor.
• Gildy started out running a girdle company ("If you want the best of corsets, of course it's Gildersleeve") before becoming Summerfield's water commissioner.
• He was named water commissioner in the October 18, 1942 episode and kept the job for the rest of the series.
• Leonard Levinson, an assistant writer on Fibber McGee, began writing Gildersleeve in 1941. He left in 1942 to work for the Office of War Information.

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