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All American Old Time Radio Show Classic

Red Skelton
The Raleigh Cigarette Program

For a small taste of this great series,
listen to the preview below.

This show comes on 2 CDs In MP3 Format

Red Skelton (Richard Bernard) was a comedian who was best known as a top radio and television star from 1937 to 1971. Skelton's show business career began in his teens as a circus clown and went on to vaudeville, Broadway, films, radio, TV, clubs and casinos, while pursuing another career as a painter. He was born July 18, 1913 in Vincennes, Indiana We lost him on September 17, 1997 in Palm Springs, California.

Red Skelton was the son of a Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus clown named Joe who died in 1913 shortly before the birth of his son. Skelton himself got one of his earliest tastes of show business with the same circus as a teenager. Before that, however, he had been given the show business bug at age ten by entertainer Ed Wynn, who spotted him selling newspapers in front of the Pantheon Theatre, in Vincennes, Indiana, trying to help his family. After buying every newspaper in Skelton's stock, Wynn took the boy backstage and introduced him to every member of the show with which he was traveling. By age 15, Skelton had hit the road full-time as an entertainer, working everywhere from medicine shows and vaudeville to burlesque, showboats, minstrel shows and circuses.

After 1937 appearances on The Rudy Vallee Show, Skelton became a regular in 1939 on NBC's Avalon Time, sponsored by Avalon Cigarettes. On October 7, 1941, Skelton premiered his own radio show, The Raleigh Cigarette Program, developing routines involving a number of recurring characters, including punch-drunk boxer Cauliflower McPugg, inebriated Willie Lump-Lump and "mean widdle kid" Junior, whose favorite phrase ("I dood it!") became part of the American lexicon. There was con man San Fernando Red with his pair of cross-eyed seagulls, Gertrude and Heathcliffe, and singing cabdriver Clem Kadiddlehopper, a country bumpkin with a big heart and a slow wit. Skelton also helped sell WWII war bonds on the top-rated show, which featured Ozzie and Harriet Nelson in the supporting cast, plus the Ozzie Nelson Orchestra and announcer Truman Bradley. Harriet Nelson was the show's vocalist.

Skelton was drafted in March 1944, and the popular series was discontinued June 6, 1944. Shipped overseas to serve with an Army entertainment unit as a private, Skelton had a nervous breakdown in Italy, spent three months in a hospital and was discharged in September, 1945. He once joked about his military career, "I was the only celebrity who went in and came out a private." On December 4, 1945, The Raleigh Cigarette Program resumed where it left off with Skelton introducing some new characters, including Bolivar Shagnasty and J. Newton Numbskull. Lurene Tuttle and Verna Felton appeared as Junior's mother and grandmother. David Forrester and David Rose led the orchestra, featuring vocalist Anita Ellis. The announcers were Pat McGeehan and Rod O'Connor. The series ended May 20, 1949, and that fall he moved to CBS. Ironically, given that his peak of popularity came with his television show, in recent years recordings of the Red Skelton radio show have become much easier to come by than the TV show.

Some of those tidbits we all enjoy. While performing in Kansas City in 1930, Skelton met and married his first wife, Edna Stillwell. The couple divorced 13 years later, but they remained cordial enough that Stillwell remained one of his chief writers. Seven years after their marriage, Skelton caught his big break in two media at once: radio and film. Beginning with Having Wonderful Time (1938), Skelton appeared in more than 30 MGM films during the 1940s and 1950s. In 1945, he married Georgia Davis; the couple had two children, Richard and Valentina; Richard's childhood death of leukemia devastated the household. Red and Georgia divorced in 1971, and he remarried. In 1976, Georgia committed suicide by gunshot. Deeply wounded by the loss of his wife, Red would abstain from performing for the next decade and a half, finding solace only in painting clowns.

His move to television came in 1951 (the same year the network introduced I Love Lucy), when CBS beckoned Skelton to bring his radio show to television. His characters worked even better on screen than on radio; television also provoked him to create his second best-remembered character, Freddie the Freeloader, a traditional tramp whose appearance suggested the elder brother of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus clown Emmett Kelly. Skelton's weekly signoff -- "Good night and may God bless", became as familiar to television viewers as Edward R. Murrow's "Good night and good luck" or Walter Cronkite's "And that's the way it is."

Skelton was the first CBS television host to begin taping his weekly programs in color, in the early 1960s, after he bought an old movie studio and converted it for television productions. He tried to encourage CBS to tape other shows in color at the facility, although most shows were taped in black and white at Television City near the famous Farmers Market in Los Angeles. Although CBS occasionally would use NBC facilities for specials in color, the network avoided color programming until the fall of 1965, when both NBC and ABC began televising most of their programs in RCA's compatible color process. By that time, Skelton had abandoned his own studio and moved to Television City, where he resumed color programs until he left the network.

Skelton was inducted into the International Clown Hall of Fame in 1989, but as Kadiddlehopper showed, he was more than an interpretive clown. One of his best-known routines was "The Pledge of Allegiance," in which he explained the pledge word by word. Another Skelton staple, a pantomime of the crowd at a small town parade as the American flag passes by, reflected Skelton's rural, Americana tastes.

Red Skelton will have you laughing till the tears start flowing, with over 125+ episodes and better then 64 hours contained on 2 CDs. So grab that box of tissues and start listening.

The following are the episodes contained on the two CD set.

We want to thank Wikipedia for some of the background information on this show.

Presented for your enjoyment is an entire episode for you to sample.

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Copyright 2007, DeFiore Enterprises All Rights Reserved

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