CD 7B: “School on Saturday” – 01/29/1956 When Mr. Conklin calls for staff and students to come to school on a Saturday, the students are outraged. OUR MISS BROOKS They do show up on campus…but only to protest against the Principal! School Spirit CD 8A: “Charity Auction” - 02/05/1956 Program Guide by Elizabeth McLeod Connie’s tasked with leading an auction for a fundraiser. Going once! Going twice! Sold! Gale Gordon and Eve Arden Other than your immediate family, probably no adult figures had a greater impact on your life than your teachers. And yet, Americans have generally had an odd CD 8B: “Mr. Conklin’s Statue” - 02/12/1956 arms-length relationship with their educators -- often paying them peanuts, The principal of Madison High mounts a drive to raise a monument…to himself. denying them professional respect, and stereotyping them as dried-up joyless old fun-spoilers. From Washington Irving’s vivid portrayal of bony, desiccated Ichabod Crane to the glowering needle-nosed Miss Grundy of Archie Comics fame, teachers were rarely portrayed in mass culture with any sort of empathy or respect. But one radio program worked to break that mold by offering a schoolteacher who was as far from a nagging Grundy-ish crone as the popular imagination could handle: the delightful postwar favorite Our Miss Brooks. If you enjoyed this CD set, we recommend Our Miss Brooks: Faculty Feuds, available The first half of the twentieth century saw the height of the Mean Old Teacher now at www.RadioSpirits.com. stereotype in America -- “readin’ and writin’ and ‘rith-a-matic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick.” But that stereotype drifted further and further from the ac- tual reality of the classroom with every passing year. Even before the First World War, the modern schoolteacher was a well-trained, well-educated professional. They were in tune with the latest trends in scholastic theory, and eager www.RadioSpirits.com and willing to teach students PO Box 1315, Little Falls, NJ 07424 as human beings (rather than simply marking time by cram- Audio programs released under license from series rights holders. ming pointless rote memori- © 2019 Al Lewis Estate. All rights reserved. Manufactured under zation into their heads). New, exclusive license. Unauthorized duplication prohibited. airy, modern school buildings fast replaced the dilapidated Program Guide © 2019 Elizabeth McLeod and RSPT LLC. All Rights Reserved. old nineteenth-century school- houses as America moved into 48352 the 1920s, and teachers who couldn’t keep pace with the new trends found themselves overtaken by eager CD 1A: “Stretch Is In Love Again” - 10/24/1954 young specialists who understood the emerging field of child psychology as well Stretch Snodgrass gets involved with the daughter of the principal of a rival as they understood the proverbial Three R’s. By the 1940s, the average Ameri- school…and doesn’t realize that she may have an ulterior motive. can public school teacher was a woman in her thirties, with a four-year college degree and a crisp, modern attitude to go with her extensive training. She did not CD 1B: “Male Superiority” - 01/16/1955 dress severely in black, she did not wear heavy low-heeled shoes, she did not Who’s better in an emergency, men or women? The Madison gang finds out! wear her hair in a tight bun, and she did not scowl angrily at her students over a thick pince-nez. And she had a life of her own away from the classroom. CD 2A: “The Pen Pal Project” - 01/23/1955 Who’s Mr. Boynton’s mysterious French correspondent? That was the type of teacher that writer Al Lewis had in mind when he pitched a new idea for a situation comedy in 1947. No relation to the actor who went CD 2B: “Project X” - 03/06/1955 on to play Grandpa Munster, Lewis was a veteran comedy scribe who’d had Never mind Big Brother -- Mr. Conklin is eavesdropping on you! considerable success at CBS with My Friend Irma. That series stood out not just for the quality of its scripts, but for the fact that it was wholly owned and CD 3A: “An American Tragedy” - 04/03/1955 developed by the network (instead of a sponsor or an ad agency). Together A rural retreat for Connie and Mr. Boynton leads to -- well, you can imagine. with producer Harry Ackerman, William S. Paley took an active interest in the CD 3B: “Spring Cleaning” - 05/01/1955 development of Lewis’s project. A slick vacuum cleaner salesman spells trouble for Mrs. Davis. Lewis gave the new series a solid foundation with his sympathetic-yet-sardonic CD 4A: “The Spring Garden” - 05/29/1955 portrayal of modern high school life. However, the program did not leap fully What happens when the school goat discovers the school garden? developed from his typewriter. From the beginning, the script was seen as a potential vehicle for a name star, and producer Ackerman’s first impulse was to CD 4B: “Bye Bye Boynton” - 07/10/1955 offer the role to Broadway favorite Shirley Booth (below) -- known and beloved The Brooks-Boynton romance hits the rocks. for her portrayals of wised-up two-fisted women, generally with a heavy tinge of Brooklyn sass about them. She was well-known to radio listeners for her years CD 5A: “The Non-Fraternization Policy” - 07/24/1955 as the original Miss Duffy of Duffy’s Tavern, but the end of her marriage to series Mr. Conklin tries to keep the boys away from the girls -- and vice versa. star Ed Gardner brought an abrupt end to her tenure on that show. She had been confining her radio work to occasional guest spots when Ackerman approached CD 5B: “Marriage Madness” - 07/31/1955 her about his new series. Mrs. Davis gets sweet on that nice man from the butcher shop. Booth recorded an audition episode CD 6A: “The Cat Burglars” - 08/07/1955 in early 1948, but Ackerman found Who’s behind a wave of break-ins around town? her portrayal of Connie Brooks too brittle, too sardonic, and too obviously CD 6B: “Summer Vacation” - 09/04/1955 working-class for a situation comedy. Summer’s winding down, but Mr. Conklin is determined Booth’s Miss Brooks, ever griping to get the most out of what’s left. about her low pay and poor treatment, sounded like she might have been CD 7A: “Saving the School Newspaper” - 12/04/1955 right at home walking a picket line… Walter Denton’s editorials in the school paper may have Dick Crenna is heard but both Ackerman and the network gone too far. Shirley Booth as Walter Denton. 2 7 Eve Arden’s career tapered off in the years after had someone a bit less militant-sounding (with Our Miss Brooks ended. She dabbled in Broadway, more of a sense of humor) in mind for the part. made the occasional film, and enjoyed a brief but Paley suggested another actress, one who had flashy success on television. In the raucous 1967-69 extensive experience in playing tart-tongued NBC sitcom The Mothers-In-Law, she ramped up women on the air, on stage, and on the screen her brassy persona to the highest possible level in a -- the glass-voiced Eve Arden (right). Al Lewis formidable pairing with co-star Kaye Ballard. She was no stranger to Arden, having written for spent the 1970s and ‘80s doing selected television her during her tempestuous run opposite co- guest shots, which often came across as campy star/clandestine lover Danny Kaye on the revisitations of her snappy screen manner. A prime latter’s wartime comedy-variety series. On that example of this was her 1983 performance as the program, she’d played the part of an all-purpose Eve Arden Robert Rockwell and Eve Arden Queen of Hearts in a PBS dramatization of Alice in comic foil, a hard-boiled Mary Livingstone Wonderland. Her health faltered as the 1990s dawned, and heart failure claimed figure to Kaye’s twittering-eccentric Jack Benny. The role of Connie Brooks, her in November 1990. however, would be far more a creature of the real world. This suited Arden’s talents just fine -- she wasn’t just a lively comedienne, she also was a gifted In the wake of her passing, Arden got a dignified obituary and passing notice on straightforward actress, known in her film career for playing women who tended the TV news programs -- but nowhere near the coverage a major screen star of to be blunt and honest to a fault. She was so well established in such roles, in fact, her generation might have merited. But few actresses ever earned the immortality that the “Eve Arden type” had already become a byword in movie casting offices of becoming a “type” -- casting directors with long memories might refer to “an when director’s wanted someone who could deliver a tough-with-a-heart-of-gold Eve Arden type” even today. And few ever left behind a character as well-liked portrayal…roles which very often went to Arden herself. and fondly remembered as Connie Brooks. She was the teacher every student wished they’d had, and the teacher every adult remembered their favorite teacher Eve Arden was about to turn forty in 1948, and had been a screen fixture for over as being like. And in playing that role, Eve Arden helped to change the popular- a decade. Born Eunice Quedens, the daughter of an unstable and unhappy home, culture image of the American teacher for the better…and gave audiences a lot she’d struck out on her own as soon as she could manage.