March 24th: As Jackie Gleason would say, a little traveling music!!! We offer it for radio, vaudeville, Broadway and film performer Belle Baker who became the first person to host a radio broadcast from a moving train, on this day in 1932. That variety program was heard on New York’s WABC. Eddie Cantor paid this lady quite the compliment at one time in saying Belle Baker is, “Dinah Shore, Patti Page, Peggy Lee and Judy Garland all rolled into one.”
Suddenly, Major Bowes’ “Original Amateur Hour” had a much larger listening audience on this night in 1935. That’s when the broadcast, which had been heard only in New York City, debuted on NBC Radio. In 1948, after Bowes’ death, Ted Mack succeeded him in the TV version. This was a program that covered all the bases, in running more than 20 years on Dumont, ABC, NBC and CBS.
The Broadway curtain went up for the first time on this night in 1955 for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.” Starring Barbara Bel Geddes and Ben Gazzara, the hit show ran for 694 performances and when Gazzara left he was succeeded by Jack Lord who thirteen years later, after a lot of TV work, starred for a dozen seasons as Steve McGarrett on “Hawaii 5-0.”
On this date in 1958, Elvis Presley got the message, “You’re in the Army now!!” For a young man in the process of trying to strike it rich as a vocalist and an actor, the future king of rock and roll, reportedly was compensated by Uncle Sam to the tune of 78 bucks a month.
For 444 days in the late 70s and early 80s the U.S. and Iran were locked in a diplomatic battle over 52 American hostages who were seized when the American Embassy in Teheran was overrun by Iranian militants on November 4, 1979. It was big news and a few days later, ABC News, in an attempt compete with “The Tonight Show,” launched “The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage,” which on this date in 1980 changed its name to “Nightline.” Frank Reynolds was the broadcast’s original host but left the program in its early days and was succeeded by Ted Koppel who anchored “Nightline” and its predecessor for more than 25 years until his decision to leave ABC News in 2005.
In what’s regarded as one of the worst environmental disasters on record, the freighter Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989,
spilling more than 10,000,000 million gallons of crude oil.
Checking on this day’s cake and candles club members…
–William Smith, who got into the entertainment business initially at age 8 and now has nearly 300 feature films and television programs under his belt, including “Twlight’s Last Gleaming,” “Anyway Which Way You Can” “Hawaii 5-0,” (the original), and “Walker, Texas Ranger,” is 81.
–Bob Mackey, the Oscar and Emmy-winning fashion designer best known for providing unique costumes for a variety of icons including Carol Burnett, Cher
and Judy Garland, is 74.
–Brooklyn’s own, Donna Pescow who’s done extensive television work with roles in three soaps, “One Life to Live,” “All My Children,” and much later, “General Hospital,” is 60. Pescow broke into show business
with a part in the 1977 hit film, “Saturday Night Fever.”
–Robert Carradine, the veteran actor who’s appeared in “Body Bags,” “Revenge of the Nerds,” and made his first film with John Wayne in “The Cowboys” in 1972,
is 60. Yes, he’s the son of John and the brother of Keith and David…
–Peyton Manning, among the best quarterbacks in history and a five-time winner of the NFL MVP award, is 38. Manning is one of a half-dozen signal callers to toss seven touchdown passes in one game.
–Chris Bosh, the big man for the NBA Champion Miami Heat, is 29.
Naturally, if this happens to be your big day, many happy returns!!!
–by Bob Gibson, [email protected]
Gibson has amassed a fifty-year career in the broadcasting industry, having excelled in a variety of areas including news, sports, business, commercial and promotional voice-over and industrial narration.
Before leaving New York, Bob logged eleven years as the back-up voice for CBS Television, hosted the nationally syndicated Old-Time Radio Show, “Radio Theater,” and was a news anchor/writer for five years at WOR Radio.
All of this followed nearly two decades at WCBS NewsRadio88.
In looking back on eighteen years at WCBS, Gibson remains convinced that there’s no greater satisfaction than to be able to inform an audience of not only a given day’s developments but to stay abreast of breaking stories as well. Among the major stories handled by Bob throughout his career were the first two NBC Radio News bulletins that Richard Nixon would resign the Presidency, twice-an-hour Persian Gulf War updates for the CBS Radio owned and operated stations, hourly ABC Radio News updates on the U.S. Hostages Crisis in Iran, on-scene coverage of the Pirates 1971 World Championship in Pittsburgh and the 1967 Silver Bridge disaster that sent 46 people to their deaths in the Ohio River.
Before returning to WCBS in 1981, Gibson was a network hourlies news correspondent for ABC Radio and NBC Radio in New York and for the Mutual Broadcasting System in Washington, during the Watergate era.
Prior to that, Bob was the morning news anchor at KDKA Radio in Pittsburgh and the midday news broadcaster at WGAR Radio in Cleveland.
While radio remains his first love, Gibson has also done television as an on-camera sports broadcaster at KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, as a news and commercial announcer at WBNS and at WATR-TV in Waterbury, Connecticut. In more recent years, Bob has done promotional voice-over work for CBS and NBC Television, as well at WOR-TV and SportsChannel. Gibson has also been the “voice” on some of the sequences in the syndicated series “Super Bowl Winning Moments,” and “Olympic Winning Moments.”
A native New Yorker, Gibson earned a Master of Arts Degree from Ohio University after doing his undergraduate work at the New York Institute Of Technology.
Bob and his wife, Ros, bid farewell to New Jersey in the summer of 2007and now reside in Boynton Beach, FL.
