RCA
The RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, founded as the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of General Electric. An innovative and progressive company, RCA was the dominant electronics and communications firm in the United States for over five decades. RCA was at the forefront of the mushrooming radio industry in the early 1920s, as a major manufacturer of radio receivers, the exclusive manufacturer of the first superheterodyne models. RCA created the first American radio network, the National Broadcasting Company; the company was a pioneer in the introduction and development of television, both black-and-white and color. During this period, RCA was identified with the leadership of David Sarnoff, he was general manager at the company's founding, became president in 1930, remained active, as chairman of the board, until the end of 1969. RCA's impregnable stature began to weaken in the mid-1970s, as it attempted to diversify and expand into a multifaceted conglomerate.
The company suffered enormous financial losses in the mainframe computer industry and other failed projects such as the CED videodisc. In 1986, RCA was reacquired by General Electric, which over the next few years liquidated most of the corporation's assets. Today, RCA exists as a brand name only. RCA originated as a reorganization of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. In 1897, the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, was founded in London to promote the radio inventions of Guglielmo Marconi; as part of worldwide expansion, in 1899 American Marconi was organized as a subsidiary company, holding the rights to use the Marconi patents in the United States and Cuba. In 1912 it took over the assets of the bankrupt United Wireless Telegraph Company, from that point forward it had been the dominant radio communications company in the United States. With the entry of the United States into World War One in April 1917, the government took over most civilian radio stations, to use them for the war effort.
Although the overall U. S. government plan was to restore civilian ownership of the seized radio stations once the war ended, many Navy officials hoped to retain a monopoly on radio communication after the war. Defying instructions to the contrary, the Navy began purchasing large numbers of stations outright. With the conclusion of the conflict, Congress turned down the Navy's efforts to have peacetime control of the radio industry, instructed the Navy to make plans to return the commercial stations it controlled, including the ones it had improperly purchased, to the original owners. Due to national security considerations, the Navy was concerned about returning the high-powered international stations to American Marconi, since a majority of its stock was in foreign hands, the British largely controlled the international undersea cables; this concern was increased by the announcement in late 1918 of the formation of the Pan-American Wireless Telegraph and Telephone Company, a joint venture between American Marconi and the Federal Telegraph Company, with plans to set up service between the United States and South America.
The Navy had installed a high-powered Alexanderson alternator, built by General Electric, at the American Marconi transmitter site in New Brunswick, New Jersey. It proved to be superior for transatlantic transmissions to the spark transmitters, traditionally used by the Marconi companies. Marconi officials were so impressed by the capabilities of the Alexanderson alternators that they began making preparations to adopt them as their standard transmitters for international communication. A tentative plan made with General Electric proposed that over a two-year period the Marconi companies would purchase most of GE's alternator production. However, this proposal was met with disapproval, on national security grounds, by the U. S. Navy, concerned that this would guarantee British domination of international radio communication; the Navy, claiming it was acting with the support of President Wilson, looked for an alternative that would result in an "all-American" company taking over the American Marconi assets.
In April 1919 two naval officers, Admiral H. G. Bullard and Commander S. C. Hooper, met with GE's president, Owen D. Young, asking that he suspend the pending alternator sales to the Marconi companies; this move would leave General Electric without a buyer for its transmitters, so the officers proposed that GE purchase American Marconi, use the assets to form its own radio communications subsidiary. Young consented to this proposal, effective November 20, 1919, transformed American Marconi into the Radio Corporation of America; the new company was promoted as being a patriotic gesture. RCA's incorporation papers required that its officers needed to be U. S. citizens, with a majority of its stock held by Americans. RCA retained most of the American Marconi staff, although Owen Young became the new company's head as the chairman of the board. Former American Marconi vice president and general manager E. J. Nally become RCA's first president. Nally's term ended on December 31, 1922, he was succeeded the next day by Major General James G. Harbord.
Harbord
Don DeFore
Donald John DeFore was an American actor. He is best known for his roles in the sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet from 1952 to 1957 and the sitcom Hazel from 1961 to 1965, the former of which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. DeFore was one of seven children born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Joseph Ervin, a railroad engineer who worked at the Chicago and North Western Transportation Company and was a local politician, Albina Sylvia DeFore. DeFore's mother, who directed plays at their local church, was of Czechoslovakian descent. After graduating from Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, DeFore attended the University of Iowa, he studied law while playing basketball and baseball before becoming interested in acting. Since acting was not a major study at the university, he left and enrolled at the Pasadena Community Playhouse, where he won a scholarship and stayed for three years. During this time, he and four fellow students wrote a play called Where Do We Go From Here? It was presented in a little theater in Hollywood with DeFore in the cast.
As a young man, DeFore toured the country in stock companies for several years before making his Broadway debut in Where Do We Go From Here? in 1938, when Oscar Hammerstein II offered to take it to Broadway, DeFore and five of the original cast members went along. The show ran for four weeks, DeFore was soon recognized as a member of legitimate theater, he remained in New York and won a key role in The Male Animal, which ran for eight months on Broadway and eight months on the road. In Hollywood, DeFore's first screen appearance was in a bit part in 1936's Reunion. By the early 1940s, he was appearing in films such as: The Male Animal, A Guy Named Joe, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, You Came Along, Without Reservations, It Happened on Fifth Avenue, Romance on the High Seas, My Friend Irma and Jumping Jacks. In 1946, exhibitors voted him the fourth-most promising "star of tomorrow". DeFore worked in radio, performing on such programs as Suspense, Old Gold Comedy Theater, Lux Radio Theatre, but he is best known for his work in television.
Beginning in 1952, DeFore had a recurring role as the Nelsons' friendly neighbor, "Thorny", on the ABC sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, earning a nomination in 1955 for a Best Supporting Actor in a Regular Series Primetime Emmy Award. In time though, the role of Thorny was superseded by Lyle Talbot as Joe Randolph, Mary Jane Croft as his wife Clara. From 1954 to 1955, he served as president of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, he was instrumental in arranging for the Emmy Awards to be broadcast on national television for the first time on March 7, 1955. He served on the board of the Screen Actors Guild. From 1961 to 1965, DeFore was a co-star of the television series Hazel as "Mr. B.", employer of the spirited, domineering housekeeper Hazel Burke, played by Shirley Booth and based on the cartoon character appearing in The Saturday Evening Post. DeFore was not the original actor to portray George Baxter. In the pilot episode, the role was played by character actor Edward Andrews.
DeFore took over the role. The series ran on prime time until 1966 when it was canceled by NBC. DeFore and his co-star Whitney Blake were written out of the series when CBS picked up the series for its final season. For his contribution to the television industry, Don DeFore has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame located at 6804 Hollywood Blvd. In 1965, DeFore and his daughter Penny wrote With All My Love, a book detailing Penny's experiences working in a Korean orphanage. DeFore released his memoirs, Hollywood DeFore and After. DeFore married singer Marion Holmes on February 14, 1942. Judy Garland served as Holmes' matron of honor. Holmes performed with the Henry Busse Orchestra from 1935 to 1939, with Art Kassel and his "Castles in the Air" from 1939 until their marriage, they had five children: Penny, Dawn and Autumn. They remained married until DeFore's death in 1993. DeFore and his family were longtime residents of the Mandeville Canyon section of Brentwood and attended the Village Church of Westwood Lutheran.
DeFore served as Brentwood's honorary Mayor and served as a member of the advisory committee for the California Department of Rehabilitation. DeFore was a 33rd degree Freemason. From 1957 to 1962, DeFore and his family operated the Silver Banjo Barbecue, a restaurant located in Frontierland of Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California. In July 1969, DeFore served as the American delegate at the Moscow International Film Festival. A long-time Republican, DeFore was a delegate at the 1980 Republican National Convention, his friend, former actor and 40th President of the United States Ronald Reagan, appointed him to the Presidential Advisory Council to the Peace Corps. On December 22, 1993, DeFore died of cardiac arrest at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, he is interred at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Don DeFore on IMDb Don DeFore at the Internet Broadway Database Don DeFore Official Fan Site – DeFore.net Don DeFore at TVGuide.com Don DeFore Collection at University of Southern California Cinema-Television Library Don DeFore at Find a Grave
Whitney Blake
Whitney Blake was an American film and television actress and producer. She is known for her four seasons as Dorothy Baxter, the mother, on the 1960s sitcom Hazel, as co-creator and writer of the sitcom One Day at a Time. With her first husband, she had three children, including actress Meredith Baxter. Blake was born in Los Angeles, California, she was the first child of Martha Mae Whitney and Harry C. Whitney, a United States Secret Service agent who had guarded President Woodrow Wilson, his wife, other political officials. Blake and her younger brother traveled around the country extensively, during which time she attended 16 different schools. While attending Pasadena City College, she worked in small theater groups in the Los Angeles area. In the summer, she worked at her mother's ice-cream stand in Oregon. Blake gained acting experience with five years' work in little-theater productions, in 1953, she was in several productions at the Pasadena Playhouse. After her appearance in an amateur Hollywood production of The Women caught the attention of agent Sid Gold, she appeared on a number of television series, including the syndicated Johnny Midnight, Sheriff of Cochise, twice on Rod Cameron's State Trooper, on the David Janssen crime drama, Richard Diamond, Private Detective.
Her first television appearance was on NBC Matinee Theater. Blake was cast in My Gun Is Quick, the film version of a Mike Hammer novel. In 1957, Blake appeared in the first episode of CBS's Perry Mason, "The Case of the Restless Redhead", in the title role of Evelyn Bagby, the defendant. In 1958, she again appeared in the title role as defendant Diana Reynolds in the episode, "The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde". In 1957, she played Lilli Bridgeman, who hires a professional assassin to murder her husband, Les, so she can marry a rival rancher, Kiley Rand, in the episode "Hired Gun" of the ABC/Warner Bros. Western series, starring Clint Walker. Blake played leading lady to James Garner in "The Day They Hanged Bret Maverick", the second-season opener in 1958 for the ABC/WB Western series, Maverick, she appeared with Claude Akins in two 1959 episodes, "Cattle Drive" and "Border Incident" of the CBS Western, The Texan, starring Rory Calhoun. In 1959, Blake guest-starred in the first episode, "The Good Samaritan", of the syndicated Western series Pony Express.
That same year, her guest appearance in the short-lived series The D. A.'s Man garnered her an Emmy nomination. She appeared in a Gunsmoke episode called "Wind" in March 1959. Blake played a gambler's lady, she guest-starred on an episode of the detective series 77 Sunset Strip. Blake appeared with Jack Webb, as a childless couple wanting to adopt a baby; the "-30-" comes from the symbol of the end of a newspaper story, as Webb played a newspaperman in the film. Blake guest-starred on Mike Connors's CBS detective series, the CBS sitcom and Gladys, on the NBC Western series, starring Darren McGavin, Overland Trail, with William Bendix and Doug McClure, she performed the lead female dramatic role on the Route 66 TV series in a January 1960 episode. She guest-starred on police drama TV series M Squad, starring Lee Marvin. In 1960 with Robert Lansing, she co-starred in an episode of the TV series Thriller. Blake is best remembered for having portrayed Dorothy Baxter, an interior designer and the wife of George Baxter, a lawyer, on the NBC sitcom Hazel, starring Shirley Booth in the title role as a bossy maid.
Bobby Buntrock played Harold Baxter. Oddly, Blake played Mrs. Baxter on Hazel, the name of her first husband and the surname of her three children in real life. Following the show's cancellation by NBC in 1965, DeFore and Blake were dropped from the series when CBS picked up the show for one more season, they were replaced by Ray Fulmer and Lynn Borden in the roles of Steve and Barbara Baxter, the younger brother and sister-in-law of George Baxter. After Hazel, Blake guest-starred in an episode of the ABC Western series The Legend of Jesse James. In 1966, she appeared in the episode "Nice Day for a Hanging" of Chuck Connors's NBC Western series, Branded, she guest-starred in a 1974 episode of Cannon. As demand for her work in network television and films waned, Blake became a Los Angeles television talk-show host. Blake moved into directing and producing. For generations, Blake may be best known for her work in co-creating with her husband, Allan Manings, the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning television series One Day at a Time.
The sitcom ran for nine seasons on the CBS network, making household names of its stars: Bonnie Franklin, Mackenzie Phillips, Valerie Bertinelli, Pat Harrington. Blake married Tom Baxter in early 1944, they had three children: sons, Richard Whitney Baxter and Brian Thomas Baxter, daughter, Meredith Ann Baxter. In 1988, her son Brian began co-ownership in a Minneapolis bookstore, Baxter's Books, which closed in 1998, her daughter, became an actress, starring in the 1980s hit sitcom Family Ties. In 1957, Blake married talent agent Jack X Fields. R&B and Pop singer, Whitney Houston was named after Blake, as stated in the 2018 documentary Whitney. From August 24, 1968, until her death in 2002, she was married to writer/collaborator Allan Manings. According to the book Untied, by Whitney Blake's daughter, Meredith Baxter, on Whitney's 76th birthday, her children took Manings and her t
Single-camera setup
The single-camera setup, or single-camera mode of production known as Portable Single Camera, is a method of filmmaking and video production. The single-camera setup developed during the birth of the classical Hollywood cinema in the 1910s and has remained the standard mode of production for cinema. In this setup, each of the various shots and camera angles are taken using the same camera, or multiple cameras pointed in one direction, which are moved and reset to get each shot or new angle. If a scene cuts back and forth between actor A and actor B, the director will first point the camera towards A and run part or all of the scene from this angle move the camera to point at B, run the scene through from this angle. Choices can be made during the post-production editing process for when in the scene to use each shot, when to cut back and forth between the two angles; this then allows parts of the scene to be removed if it is felt that the scene is too long. In practice, sometimes two cameras shooting from the same angle are used: one to capture a medium shot, the other a close-up during the same take.
By contrast, a multiple-camera setup consists of multiple cameras arranged to capture all of the different camera angles of the scene and the set must be lit to accommodate all camera setups concurrently. Multi-camera production results in faster but less versatile videography, whereas the single-camera setup is more time-consuming but gives the director more control over each shot. Unlike film producers, who always opt for single-camera shooting, television producers need to make a distinct decision to shoot in either single-camera or multiple-camera mode. Single-camera is reserved for prime time dramas, made-for-TV movies, music videos and commercial advertisements. Soap operas, talk shows, game shows, most reality television series, sitcoms more use the multiple-camera setup. Multiple-camera shooting is the only way that an ensemble of actors presenting a single performance before a live audience can be recorded from multiple perspectives. For standard, dialogue-driven domestic situation comedies, the multi-camera technique, cheaper and takes less production time, is used.
Situation comedies may be shot in either multiple- or single-camera modes. It may be deemed preferable to use the single-camera technique if specific camera angles and camera movements for a feature film-like visual style are considered crucial to the success of the production, if visual effects are to be used. Though multi-camera was the norm for U. S. sitcoms during the 1950s, the 1960s saw increased technical standards in situation comedies, which came to have larger casts and used a greater number of different locations in episodes. Several comedy series of the era made use of feature film techniques. To this end, many comedies of this period, including Leave It to Beaver, Mister Ed, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, The Addams Family, The Munsters, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Gilligan's Island, Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes, Family Affair and The Brady Bunch, used the single-camera technique. Apart from giving the shows a feature film style, this technique was better suited to the visual effects used in these shows, such as magical appearances and disappearances and lookalike doubles in which the regular actors played a dual role.
These effects were created using editing and optical printing techniques, would have been difficult had the shows been shot using a multi-camera setup. In the case of Get Smart, the single-camera technique allowed the series to present fast-paced and tightly-edited fight and action sequences reminiscent of the spy dramas that it parodied. Single-camera comedies were prevalent into the early 1970s. With its large cast, varied locations, seriocomic tone, the TV series M*A*S*H was shot using single-camera style. Happy Days began in 1974 as a single-camera series, before switching to the multi-camera setup in its second season. However, the success of All in the Family and Norman Lear's subsequent sitcom productions led to a renewed interest by sitcom producers in the multi-camera technique. By the mid-1970s, with domestic situation comedies in vogue, the multi-camera shooting style for sitcoms came to dominate and would continue to do so through the 1980s and 1990s, although the single-camera format was still seen in television series classified as comedy-drama or "dramedy".
In the 2000s, television saw a resurgence in the use of single-camera in sitcoms, such as I'm Alan Partridge, Malcolm in the Middle Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office, Peep Show, Arrested Development, Corner Gas, Zoey 101, The Office, My Name is Earl, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Extras, 30 Rock, Samantha Who?, The Middle, Modern Family, Glee and Recreation, Cougar Town, Happy Endings, New Girl, The Mindy Project, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Goldbergs, About a Boy, Fresh Off the Boat and Santa Clarita Diet. Unlike single-camera sitcoms of the past, nearly all contemporary comedies shot in this manner are produced without
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American English-language commercial terrestrial television network, a flagship property of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. The network is headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, with additional major offices near Los Angeles and Philadelphia; the network is one of the Big Three television networks. NBC is sometimes referred to as the "Peacock Network", in reference to its stylized peacock logo, introduced in 1956 to promote the company's innovations in early color broadcasting, it became the network's official emblem in 1979. Founded in 1926 by the Radio Corporation of America, NBC is the oldest major broadcast network in the United States. At that time the parent company of RCA was General Electric. In 1930, GE was forced to sell the companies as a result of antitrust charges. In 1986, control of NBC passed back to General Electric through its $6.4 billion purchase of RCA. Following the acquisition by GE, Bob Wright served as chief executive officer of NBC, remaining in that position until his retirement in 2007, when he was succeeded by Jeff Zucker.
In 2003, French media company Vivendi merged its entertainment assets with GE, forming NBC Universal. Comcast purchased a controlling interest in the company in 2011, acquired General Electric's remaining stake in 2013. Following the Comcast merger, Zucker left NBCUniversal and was replaced as CEO by Comcast executive Steve Burke. NBC has thirteen owned-and-operated stations and nearly 200 affiliates throughout the United States and its territories, some of which are available in Canada and/or Mexico via pay-television providers or in border areas over-the-air. During a period of early broadcast business consolidation, radio manufacturer Radio Corporation of America acquired New York City radio station WEAF from American Telephone & Telegraph. Westinghouse, a shareholder in RCA, had a competing outlet in Newark, New Jersey pioneer station WJZ, which served as the flagship for a loosely structured network; this station was transferred from Westinghouse to RCA in 1923, moved to New York City. WEAF acted as a laboratory for AT&T's manufacturing and supply outlet Western Electric, whose products included transmitters and antennas.
The Bell System, AT&T's telephone utility, was developing technologies to transmit voice- and music-grade audio over short and long distances, using both wireless and wired methods. The 1922 creation of WEAF offered a research-and-development center for those activities. WEAF maintained a regular schedule of radio programs, including some of the first commercially sponsored programs, was an immediate success. In an early example of "chain" or "networking" broadcasting, the station linked with Outlet Company-owned WJAR in Providence, Rhode Island. C. WCAP. New parent RCA saw an advantage in sharing programming, after getting a license for radio station WRC in Washington, D. C. in 1923, attempted to transmit audio between cities via low-quality telegraph lines. AT&T refused outside companies access to its high-quality phone lines; the early effort fared poorly, since the uninsulated telegraph lines were susceptible to atmospheric and other electrical interference. In 1925, AT&T decided that WEAF and its embryonic network were incompatible with the company's primary goal of providing a telephone service.
AT&T offered to sell the station to RCA in a deal that included the right to lease AT&T's phone lines for network transmission. RCA spent $1 million to purchase WEAF and Washington sister station WCAP, shut down the latter station, merged its facilities with surviving station WRC; the division's ownership was split among RCA, its founding corporate parent General Electric and Westinghouse. NBC started broadcasting on November 15, 1926. WEAF and WJZ, the flagships of the two earlier networks, were operated side-by-side for about a year as part of the new NBC. On January 1, 1927, NBC formally divided their respective marketing strategies: the "Red Network" offered commercially sponsored entertainment and music programming. Various histories of NBC suggest the color designations for the two networks came from the color of the pushpins NBC engineers used to designate affiliate stations of WEAF and WJZ, or from the use of double-ended red and blue colored pencils. On April 5, 1927, NBC expanded to the West Coast with the launch of the NBC Orange Network known as the Pacific Coast Network.
This was followed by the debut of the NBC Gold Network known as the Pacific Gold Network, on October 18, 1931. The Orange Network carried Red Network programming, the Gold Network carried programming from the Blue Network; the Orange Network recreated Eastern Red Network programming for West Coast stations at KPO in San Francisco. In 1936, the Orange Network affiliate stations became part of the Red Network, at the same time the Gold Network became part of the Blue Network. In the 1930s, NBC developed a network for shortwave radio stations, called the NBC White Network. In 1927, NBC moved its operations to 711 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, occupying the upper floors of a building de
The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post is an American magazine published six times a year. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1963 every two weeks until 1969. From the 1920s to the 1960s, it was one of the most circulated and influential magazines for the American middle class, with fiction, non-fiction and features that reached millions of homes every week; the magazine declined in readership through the 1960s, in 1969 The Saturday Evening Post folded for two years before being revived as a quarterly publication with an emphasis on medical articles in 1971. The magazine was redesigned in 2013; the Saturday Evening Post was founded in 1821 and grew to become the most circulated weekly magazine in America. The magazine gained prominent status under the leadership of its longtime editor George Horace Lorimer; the editors claimed it had historical roots in the Pennsylvania Gazette, first published in 1728 by Samuel Keimer and sold to Benjamin Franklin in 1729. It discontinued publication in 1800.
The Saturday Evening Post published current event articles, human interest pieces, illustrations, a letter column, single-panel gag cartoons and stories by the leading writers of the time. It was known for original works of fiction. Illustrations were embedded in stories and advertising; some Post illustrations became popular and continue to be reproduced as posters or prints those by Norman Rockwell. Curtis Publishing Co. stopped publishing the Post in 1969 after the company lost a landmark defamation suit and was ordered to pay over $3 million in damages. The Post was revived in 1971 as a limited circulation quarterly publication; as of the late 2000s, The Saturday Evening Post is published six times a year by the Saturday Evening Post Society, which purchased the magazine in 1982. In 1916, Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer discovered Norman Rockwell an unknown 22-year-old New York artist. Lorimer promptly purchased two illustrations from Rockwell, using them as covers, commissioned three more drawings.
Rockwell's illustrations of the American family and rural life of a bygone era became icons. During his 50-year career with the Post, Rockwell painted more than 300 covers; the Post employed Nebraska artist John Philip Falter, who became known "as a painter of Americana with an accent of the Middle West," who "brought out some of the homeliness and humor of Middle Western town life and home life." He produced 120 covers for the Post between 1943 and 1968, ceasing only when the magazine began displaying photographs on its covers. Another prominent artist was Charles R. Chickering, a freelance illustrator who went on to design numerous postage stamps for the U. S. Post Office. Other popular cover illustrators include the artists Constantin Alajalov. John Clymer, W. H. D. Koerner, J. C. Leyendecker, Charles Archibald MacLellan, John E. Sheridan, Douglass Crockwell, Amos Sewell, N. C. Wyeth; the magazine's line-up of cartoonists included Bob Barnes, Irwin Caplan, Tom Henderson, Al Johns, Clyde Lamb, Jerry Marcus, Frank O'Neal, B.
Tobey, Pete Wyma and Bill Yates. The magazine ran Ted Key's cartoon panel series Hazel from 1943 to 1969; each issue featured several original short stories and included an installment of a serial appearing in successive issues. Most of the fiction was written for mainstream tastes by popular writers, but some literary writers were featured; the opening pages of stories featured paintings by the leading magazine illustrators. The Post published stories and essays by H. E. Bates, Ray Bradbury, Kay Boyle, Agatha Christie, Brian Cleeve, Eleanor Franklin Egan, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, C. S. Forester, Ernest Haycox, Robert A. Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Gallico, Normand Poirier, Hammond Innes, Louis L'Amour, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph C. Lincoln, John P. Marquand, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck and Rex Stout and Rob Wagner, it published poetry by such noted poets as Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker and Hannah Kahn. Jack London's best-known novel The Call of the Wild was first published, in serialized form, in the Saturday Evening Post in 1903.
Emblematic of the Post's fiction was author Clarence Budington Kelland, who first appeared in 1916–17 with stories of homespun heroes, Efficiency Edgar and Scattergood Baines. Kelland was a steady presence from 1922 until 1961. For many years William Hazlett Upson contributed a popular series of short stories about the escapades of Earthworm Tractors salesman Alexander Botts. Publication in the Post helped established artists and writers stay afloat. P. G. Wodehouse said "the wolf was always at the door" until the Post gave him his "first break" in 1915 by serializing Something New. After the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Post columnist Garet Garrett became a vocal critic of the New Deal. Garrett accused the Roosevelt Administration of initiating socialist strategies. After Lorimer died, Garrett became editorial writer-in-chief and criticized the Roosevelt Administration's support of the United Kingdom and efforts to prepare to enter what became the Second World War. Garrett's positions may have cost the Post readers and advertisers.
The Post readership began to decline in the late 1960s. In general, the decline of general interest magazines was blamed on television, which competed for advertisers and readers' attention; the Post had problems retaining readers: the public's taste in fiction was changing, the Post's conservative politics and values appealed to a declining number of people. Content by popular writer
Maudie Prickett
Maudie Doyle Prickett was an American character actress who performed in over 300 stage and television productions during a career that spanned nearly four decades. Born in Portland, Prickett portrayed maids, busybodies and nosy neighbors, she made ten appearances as recurring character Rosie, a maid, friend of Hazel in the 1960s NBC sitcom Hazel starring Shirley Booth. One of her more notable film portrayals is as a maid named Elsie at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest in 1959; some of her other television credits include nine appearances as Ms. Gordon on CBS's The Jack Benny Program and five appearances as various characters on ABC's Bewitched. In 1959, she played a secretary, Miss Sanders, to the Howard McNear character, Wilbur Wilgus, on the ABC sitcom The Donna Reed Show. Prickett played Alice MacAvity in 1954 in the NBC sitcom It's a Great Life, featuring Frances Bavier, she guest-starred in the 1957-1958 NBC sitcom Sally, starring Joan Caulfield, on CBS's Dennis the Menace, with Jay North.
She appeared as a dentist's secretary in the episode "The Dentist" on another CBS sitcom, starring Annie Fargé. Parley Baer played Dr. Mathews in the episode. Prickett appeared in 1962 in the short-lived ABC/Warner Bros. sitcom, Room for One More, starring Andrew Duggan, played a regular character in 1966 on the more short-lived Tammy Grimes Show. Prickett was cast in the 1950s westerns The Adventures of Kit Carson and 26 Men, true stories of the Arizona Rangers, she portrayed Miss Taisy, Lois Lane's nurse in the classic Adventures of Superman series starring George Reeves and Phyllis Coates. She appears in several episodes of The Andy Griffith Show as Mrs. Edna Larch, as well as in the role of Myrtle on Mayberry R. F. D.. In 1965 she appeared on Get Smart as Maxwell Smart's Aunt Bertha in the episode "My Nephew the Spy". In 1970 she played the role of Mrs. Thelma Benstead, a rental house landlord on the television series Dragnet, she played on the ABC sitcom Bewitched for two episodes in 1972 as Ms. Peabody, a nosy and intrusive teacher with Tabitha Stephens.
One of her appearances was in 1974 in Jeanette Nolan's short-lived CBS western series, Dirty Sally. Maudie was married three times, her first marriage was in 1941 to Charles Fillmore Prickett II, the co-founder and general manager of the Pasadena Playhouse, with whom she had two chlldren: Charles Fillmore Prickett III, who became an orthopedic surgeon, a daughter, Charie Doyle Prickett. In 1961, seven years after the death of her first husband, she married Dr. Eakle W. Cartwright, a physician, who died the following year. Maudie's final marriage was to mayor of Pasadena. He, predeceased her. Prickett died of uremic poisoning in Pasadena, California on April 14, 1976, she is interred at Mountain View Cemetery in California. Maudie Prickett on IMDb Maudie Prickett at Find a Grave
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