Click on the link below to hear

Program 4 - July, 1970 - Peg Lynch and Margaret Hamilton

             

"Ethel and Albert"               Margaret Hamilton
Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce                                       

Peg Lynch is a radio pioneer - some call her the "Lady Who Invented Sitcom." Her warm, fast and funny creation, Ethel & Albert -- the everyday life of an average middle-class couple living in small-town America -- became one of the country's most popular husband-and-wife comedies from the day it was first heard in 1938. Starting as a three-minute filler between the Women's Hour and the weather, it zoomed from a small radio station in Minnesota to ABC in New York, where it was expanded to 15 minutes and later to a half hour. From 1963 to 1965, it reprised its original three-minute format on NBC Radio Monitor. It was revived as a syndicated radio feature in the mid-70s as The Little Things in Life. Peg Lynch's comedy is timeless and ever believable. She writes about the little things in life--losing the car keys, the jar that won't open, looking for that other shoe, the guests who leave things and then need them mailed, the driver's license that expires--the things that strike a responsive chord in us all. Devoted fans of the show included hundreds of well-known names of the day, such as James Thurber, George S. Kaufman, Jack Benny, Phil Silvers, Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Charles Laughton, Trevor Howard, Basil Rathbone, and novelist John Cheever, who expressed an interest in writing for the show (Ms. Lynch politely declined). During her six-decade career, Peg Lynch has written more than 10,000 scripts for radio and television, alone and unaided, and she still performs her comedy material across the country. Margaret Hamilton played Aunt Effie on "Ethel and Albert." A kindergarten teacher in her native Cleveland, Ms. Hamilton began her acting career there in community theater and with the prestigious Cleveland Playhouse. In 1933, Hamilton was invited to repeat her stage role of the sarcastic daughter-in-law in the Broadway play "Another Language" for the MGM film version. Though only in her early '30s, the gloriously unpretty Hamilton subsequently played dozens of busybodies, gossips, old maids, and housekeepers in films. Her most famous film assignment was the dual role of Elvira Gulch and the Wicked Witch of the West in the imperishable 1939 gem The Wizard of Oz -- a role which nearly cost her her life when her green copper makeup caught fire during one of her "disappearance" scenes. Despite her menacing demeanor, Hamilton was a gentle, soft-spoken woman; she was especially fond of children, and showed up regularly on such PBS programs as Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. In the 1970s, Margaret Hamilton added another sharply etched portrayal to her gallery of characters as general-store proprietor Cora on a popular series of Maxwell House coffee commercials -- one of which ran during a telecast of The Wizard of Oz! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide Program 4 - July, 1970 - Peg Lynch and Margaret Hamilton

Note: This is a large file; it may take a long time to load.
You can save the file to your hard drive by placing your curser over the link,
pressing the right mouse button, and selecting "save target as . . ."
With a T1, cable modem, or DSL this might take 1-3 minutes.

Return to Log of Programs