A Book About Network Television in the late 1940s and early 1950s, by Andrew Lee Fielding. Originally published in 2007 by BearManor Media. Revised Edition published in 2019. See also: www.andrewleefielding.com
At the close of
the summer of 1948, my mother graduated from Syracuse University, and in the
fall of that year became a cast member in a Broadway musical revue, Small Wonder (which starred
Tom Ewell). Toward the end of the year, while performing in the play, she made
a singing appearance on a CBS-TV variety and talent program, Places, Please. It was the
first television program on which she appeared. Soon afterwards, she sang on
the show again.
Places,
Please,
a Monday/Wednesday/Friday evening fifteen-minute program, aired in 1948 and
1949.
As New York Times critic Jack
Gould noted, in 1948, Places,
Please was "devoted to giving youngsters in the entertainment
world a chance to be heard and seen." The show's host was Barry Wood, who
had had great success as a singer, both on records, and on radio; from 1939
until 1943, he had starred on the radio show Your
Hit Parade. He was succeeded on the program by Frank Sinatra.
Until recently,
I had never seen a kinescope (or, as would most often be the case, a video made
from a kinescope) of Places,
Please. In late December I came upon a segment of one of the
telecasts, on YouTube, though I do not know its date. The segment features
dancer and singer Don Liberto. Liberto, seen in the YouTube image above, had, by this time, appeared in a number
of Broadway plays.
I like the
simplicity of the segment; it has an appealingly spare quality. Liberto dances and sings in front of a curtain, accompanied only by a
pianist. One sees only part of the piano, to one side of the stage (the pianist
is not visible). There is not a full audience; rather, there are a handful of
people, seated at the other side of the stage, watching Liberto perform. The group (seen in the image above)
includes Barry Wood, and three young women wearing sweaters adorned with the
letters "CBS."
Here is the
Wikipedia page about Barry Wood, who died in 1970:
A Blog About Early Television...Later Television...The Big Band period...and other matters of history, family, and popular culture...
REVISED EDITION NOW AVAILABLE
"The Lucky Strike Papers"--subtitled "Journeys Through My Mother's Television Past"--profiles such early network television shows as "Your Hit Parade" (also known as "The Lucky Strike Hit Parade"), "Kay Kyser's College of Musical Knowledge," and "The Freddy Martin Show." Author Andrew Fielding's late mother, Sue Bennett, sang on these programs, and others, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
To purchase a copy of the 2019 Revised Edition of the book, please visit:
Andrew Fielding has written for The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Providence Journal, The Philadelphia Daily News, Horizon Magazine, and other publications. He has also worked as a radio talk show host--in Philadelphia, in suburban Philadelphia, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in northern New Jersey. He was also, for three years, the host of a weekly talk show on a nostalgia-oriented Internet radio station. His book about early television, "The Lucky Strike Papers," was published in December, 2007 by BearManor Media. A revised edition of the book was brought out in January of 2019.