Our Miss Brooks

About Our Miss Brooks

Our Miss Brooks is the old time radio sitcom starring Eve Arden as Connie Brooks, a sharp-tongued English teacher at Madison High School. Underpaid and quick with a comeback, she spars with Osgood Conklin, the blustering principal played by Gale Gordon, and pines for Mr. Boynton, the shy, often clueless biology teacher with a pet frog named MacDougal. Critic John Crosby called her comebacks "feline." Connie was something new on radio: a capable working woman, not a scatterbrain or a homebody.

It premiered on CBS on July 19, 1948, and ran on radio until 1957, outlasting its own TV version. Real teachers loved it: the National Education Association made Arden an honorary member, and she received offers of teaching jobs. Al Lewis, who wrote most of the run, avoided the topical and stereotype jokes that date other series, so it holds up well. Richard Crenna played Walter Denton, the student who drives Connie to school, and Jane Morgan played her landlady, Mrs. Davis.

Our Miss Brooks is a workplace comedy that anyone who has worked in a school, or for a difficult boss, will recognize. Eve Arden's delivery is the draw: dry, fast and never mean. It is clean, family-friendly listening, and it was popular with the people it was about; in 1952 a teachers college alumni group honored Arden "for humanizing the American teacher," and she won TV-Radio Mirror's favorite comedienne award three years running.

What you’ll hear

• Connie's dry wisecracks at Mr. Conklin's expense, and Gale Gordon's slow burn
• Walter Denton's rattletrap car and his schemes to help Connie land Mr. Boynton
• Mrs. Davis's strange breakfasts, and her cat Minerva, who sleeps inside the piano
• Harriet Conklin, the principal's daughter, and Stretch Snodgrass, Madison's dim star athlete
• Miss Enright, the rival teacher scheming against Connie
• "The Magic Christmas Tree," the show's Christmas tradition

Where to start

• The Shirley Booth audition of April 9, 1948, recorded before Eve Arden got the part, has a completely different supporting cast.
• The first broadcast, July 19, 1948, has Conklin arriving as the new principal right after a traffic accident involving Miss Brooks. "The Magic Christmas Tree" first aired December 19, 1948, and came back on later Christmases.
• Follow the podcast for a new episode twice a week, in the order they first aired; released episodes also play free right on this page, no account needed. Plus members ($5 a month) can play every episode now.
• When you'd rather not choose, Laugh Track streams old time radio comedy like this live, around the clock.

Our Miss Brooks on the radio

CBS Radio, 1948-1957. With Eve Arden, Gale Gordon, Jeff Chandler, Richard Crenna, Gloria McMillan, Robert Rockwell.

Where the recordings come from

The these recordings here come from the Old Time Radio Researchers' Our Miss Brooks Singles set (173 episodes), hosted by the Internet Archive. Our thanks to the Old Time Radio Researchers, the volunteers who found, dated and assembled the set, and to the Archive and the collectors whose uploads it rests on. The sound is our remaster of those files (rumble, hiss and hum cleaned out, levelled to steady broadcast loudness); the recordings themselves are theirs. About our sources.

Every Our Miss Brooks episode: the full list, with air dates and stories

More to listen to

• The Jack Benny Program
• The Great Gildersleeve
• The Burns and Allen Show
• The Life of Riley
• The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show
• Christmas on old-time radio
• Halloween on old-time radio
• New Year's Eve on old-time radio
• Thanksgiving on old-time radio

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