Radio
Aunt Jenny’s best-remembered aspect was the long-running radio show, Aunt Jenny’s Real Life Stories, which made its debut on CBS on January 18, 1937. The show took the format of a dramatic serial or soap opera, presenting a different story weekly, and running for 15 minutes from 10:45am to 11:00am each weekday morning. The stories featured typical soap opera plots involving the people of a small American town called Littleton. Aunt Jenny herself was not the focus of these stories but served as host and narrator. She also offered cooking instruction, generally in the form of easy recipes which included Spry Vegetable Shortening as an ingredient.
Aunt Jenny was played by Edith Spencer, who served not only as the voice of Jenny but also provided her visual appearance in promotional materials. The announcer of the show was actor Dan Seymour. Animal imitator Henry Boyd provided the warbling of Aunt Jenny’s canary. Like most soap operas, the show had a large revolving cast over the years, serving as a springboard into professional acting for future stars, such as Richard Widmark. Eventually, Edith Spencer left the show and was replaced by Agnes Young, who sounded reasonably similar to Spencer but did not look like her. Finally, on September 28, 1956, the show’s long run came to an end.
Read more about this topic: Aunt Jenny
Famous quotes containing the word radio:
“Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“The radio ... goes on early in the morning and is listened to at all hours of the day, until nine, ten and often eleven o’clock in the evening. This is certainly a sign that the grown-ups have infinite patience, but it also means that the power of absorption of their brains is pretty limited, with exceptions, of course—I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. One or two news bulletins would be ample per day! But the old geese, well—I’ve said my piece!”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)
“England has the most sordid literary scene I’ve ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy’s writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They’re all scratching each other’s backs.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)