What happens
Gildersleeve receives an invitation to a Yesteryear Ball and decides to research his ancestors at the public library. Leroy and Marjorie, who have also been asking about their family, ask Aunt Matilda for help. Meanwhile, Leila is pressing Gildersleeve to take her to the ball, and he reads through old family records, drifting into vivid daydreams of his forebears as a South Sea trader, a financier and a pirate. The Great Gildersleeve, starring Harold Peary, was first broadcast on NBC on March 24, 1946.
Summerfield, a small town, in the 1940s, with scenes in the Gildersleeve home and the public library, plus imagined episodes from the family's past.
Characters: Gildersleeve, Leroy, Marjorie, Bertie, Leila Ransom, Aunt Matilda, Judge Hooker
Listen for: Gildersleeve's imagined ancestor scenes, the family's discovery in Aunt Matilda's letter about their surname, and the details of the Yesteryear Ball.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. 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.