What happens
Jack Benny presents a comedy episode in which he and his friends Mary Livingstone, Don Wilson and Phil Harris trade jokes about dreams, poems and Labor Day. A listener's letter asks for a play called The House of Benny, so the program stages a mock drama about Benny's birth and childhood in Waukegan, Illinois. Benny's supposed father urges him toward a sensible career, while the boy dreams of becoming a radio comedian. The episode aired on NBC and CBS Radio on August 31, 1934, with Benny in the lead alongside Livingstone, Eddie Anderson and Harris.
A radio studio in New York, where the program is broadcast, and a fictional house in Waukegan, Illinois, in a mock drama.
Characters: Jack Benny, Mary Livingstone, Don Wilson, Phil Harris, Eddie Anderson, Frank Parker, Don Bester
Listen for: The running jokes about dreams, Mary Livingstone's Labor Day poem, and the listener letter that prompts the mock play The House of Benny.
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.