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| Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll |
➦In 1940...Frank Sinatra made his professional singing debut with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. He is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 150 million records worldwide
➦In 1946... the radio quiz show “Twenty Questions” debuted on the Mutual network. Bill Slater was the quizmaster, and newscaster Fred Vandeventer, his wife Florence & son Bobby made up the panel. The latter two adopted different surnames to mask the nepotism. it was a major Monday night hit via delayed broadcast on CKWX Vancouver. The show ran for 8 years on radio & 6 more on TV.
Radio listeners sent in subjects for the panelists to guess in 20 questions.
➦In 1958...‘Frontier Gentleman‘ starring John Dehner debuted on CBS Radio. Frontier Gentleman is a short-lived radio Western series originally broadcast from February 2 to November 16, 1958,
➦In 1959...Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper made what turned out to be their last public appearances at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. They died in a plane crash a few hours later. Admission to the show was just $1.25. On September 6, 2011, The Surf Ballroom was added to the National Register of Historic Places
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| Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly |
A concrete monument was erected outside The Surf, and the ballroom is adorned with large pictures of the three musicians. A street flanking the facility's east property line is named Buddy Holly Place in his honor.
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➦In 1985...FLASHBACK...From The Pages of Radio&Records R&R....
Birch Advances
➦In 1992...radio/TV host Bert Parks lost his battle with lung cancer at age 77. He is best remembered as the singing host of The Miss America Pageant on TV for 25 years. (“There she is, Miss America….”)
Parks entered radio broadcasting at age 16, for Atlanta's WGST. Three years later, he moved to New York City and was hired as a singer and straight man on The Eddie Cantor Show, then becoming a CBS Radio staff announcer. Parks was the host of Break the Bank, which premiered on radio in 1945 and was telecast from 1948 to 1957, as well as Stop the Music on radio in 1948 and television from 1949 to 1952. With other celebrities, he hosted NBC radio's Monitor during the 1960s.
➦In 1995...actor Willard Waterman, the second man to play the lead in NBC radio’s The Great Gildersleeve, died at age 80. He had been a founding member of the radio actors’ union in 1937.Actor Willard Waterman died at age 80. He began his radio career at WIBA in Madison, WI singing in a quartet that performed "musical interludes between programs." and came to NBC in Chicago in early 1936.
➦In 2016…The surviving half of the outstanding radio comedy team ‘Bob & Ray’, Bob Elliott, succumbed to throat cancer at age 92. Ray Goulding had died 26 years earlier (1990).
➦In 2017...Entercom announced that it had agreed to merge with CBS Radio stations, but not its radio networks. The deal gave Entercom operations in 23 of the top 25 markets, and made it the second-largest owner of radio stations in the United States, behind only iHeartMedia;
