In the fall of 1948, my mother--known, then, by her given name, Sue Benjamin--joined the cast of a Broadway musical comedy revue, Small Wonder. The show starred Tom Ewell, Mary McCarty, and others. My mother, twenty years old, had graduated at the end of the summer from Syracuse University. She had a small singing role in the play, and was also understudy to Mary McCarty, and two other stars of the show: Alice Pearce, and Marilyn Day. For one performance, she substituted for Pearce, who had taken ill.
At the end of 1948, while performing in the play, she sang as a guest on a CBS-TV program, Places, Please. Soon after, she appeared on the show a second time. Places, Please, a fifteen-minute program, was telecast on CBS three evenings a week; it was a showcase program for performers who were not well-known. The host of the program was Barry Wood, who years before had been a singing star on the Lucky Strike Hit Parade radio show.
Small Wonder ended in January of 1949. A performer and friend from the play, Virginia Oswald, had begun singing on a Monday through Friday daytime program on the DuMont Television Network, The Stan Shaw Show. Shaw had for years been a popular disc jockey on New York radio. His TV show, at the time, featured Oswald, the musical group The Alan Logan Trio, and singer Jack Leonard--best-known, certainly, for his striking and lovely vocal on the hit song "Marie," recorded in 1937 with Tommy Dorsey's Orchestra.
(Here is Leonard, singing the song with Tommy Dorsey's band; the song also features a widely-admired trumpet solo by Bunny Berigan, which begins roughly halfway through the recording, just after the vocals conclude--Leonard's vocals, and the accompanying, background vocals of band members: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=12&v=32699v6zzUw )
My mother was told by Virginia Oswald that Stan Shaw's program was looking for an additional singer. She sang on the program, by way of an audition, and became part of the cast, appearing on the show until it left the air the first week of March. She then became part of a new musical program on the DuMont Network, Teen Time Tunes. The show, a weeknight, fifteen-minute program, starred The Alan Logan Trio, the musical group from Stan Shaw's program, and my mother. (It was at the end of 1949, when joining bandleader Kay Kyser's new program on NBC-TV, that she would begin using the name Sue Bennett.)
A few days after Teen Time Tunes began airing, The Jack Leonard Show, a weekly program, also had its debut on the DuMont Network. In addition to Leonard, Virginia Oswald sang on the show, and the program's small musical ensemble featured big band-era pianist Bob Curtis (he had played with the Gene Krupa, Tommy Dorsey, and Artie Shaw orchestras). Curtis would later, for several years, serve as pianist in bandleader Raymond Scott's "Lucky Strike Orchestra," on the television show Your Hit Parade.
Teen Time Tunes made its debut on the DuMont Network on March 7, 1949, and aired until July 15, 1949--seventy years ago this past week.
(Above: Sue Benjamin and Alan Logan Trio guitarist Al Chernet, on Teen Time Tunes; DuMont Network photograph.)
