Watching TV with my parents in the 1960s, they would often see an actor with a mustache and a sarcastic delivery and say, “There’s old Gildersleeve!” Sometimes it was Harold Peary, other times Willard Waterman. Unfortunately, it was just as often Frank Nelson or Dick Wilson, which left little me really confused! Who the heck was this “Gildersleeve,” anyway?
Around 1980, a local college radio station began running The Great Gildersleeve every Friday morning at 11:30 AM. From memory, I could see the character in my mind as a pretentious man with a mustache and over time pieced together the story as to how Willard Waterman replaced Hal Peary on the series and played the character for another nine years, on both radio and television.
Leading a surreal life as I do, a decade later, I found myself actually meeting and working with Willard Waterman in radio re-creations, and a few years beyond that actually appearing in a Great Gildersleeve re-creation—as Judge Hooker—with him, as well as two other original co-stars, Shirley Mitchell and Louise Erickson.
My wife and I also got to have lunch once with the late Charlie Stumpf, a well-respected author on nostalgic subjects. Stumpf wrote early books on Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, and Walter Tetley, who played Gildy’s nephew, Leroy.
The new book, From Girdle Maker to Water Commissioner—The Great Gildersleeve, written by Kristine Ohkubo, builds on the research of Stumpf and other OTR experts who have gone before her. The author has compiled not so much a history of the show’s individual seasons and story arcs but of the backgrounds of the show itself—one of the very first sitcoms as we know them today—and highly informative biographical sections on all involved.
By her own admission, this is not intended for the hardcore Gildy fans but more as an introduction to the great man’s world and those creators who brought it to life for nearly 20 years. Nevertheless, I learned quite a bit that I didn’t know! After a lengthy section detailing the history and background of the parent show, Fibber McGee and Molly, the bulk of the rest of the book consists of biographical chapters on the stars of The Great Gildersleeve. Peary and Waterman, naturally, but also the secondary stars, and even some major guest stars are presented with equal treatment, giving us coverage of not only Shirley Mitchell and Lillian Randolph but also lesser players like Gloria Holliday (Peary’s real-life wife at one point) and future screen star Richard Crenna (the Rambo movies), whose character married the Commissioner’s niece, Marjorie. Parley Baer (another old friend from the OTR cons) is covered, as is Jim Backus, Gale Gordon, Olan Soule, and Joseph Kearns—all with their unmistakable radio voices.
Each of the subjects gets a photo or two and, in fact, the photos throughout the book are extremely well chosen and mostly rare, new even to a longtime fan like myself. Some amazing pictures!
The reader also gets some basic coverage of the Gildersleeve character’s appearances in movies in the 1940s and on television in the 1950s. The mix-up that left Waterman custody of the Water Commissioner role on NBC led to Hal Peary developing his own similar series (too similar, many might say) for CBS, and that is rightly covered here as well. The backmatter offers a known episode checklist for The Great Gildersleeve and a fun trivia section.
All in all, Kristine Ohkubo has done an impressive job, and both her enthusiasm and her professionalism show through. Despite documenting many of her sources, a few minor mistakes managed to creep in, perhaps inevitably, but for pure enjoyable reading about one of my all-time favorite radio series, From Girdle Maker to Water Commissioner—The Great Gildersleeve would make an ideal introduction to arguably the first true sitcom for anyone who just likes good entertaining comedies…with a little bit of drama and romance…and music!
I once wrote that without younger generations discovering old time radio for its pure entertainment value, and not just out of rapidly fading nostalgia, it would go the way of Sanskrit, only to be studied in museums rather than actively enjoyed. Kristine Ohkubo discovered it, and is here presenting it to others. I hope she continues to write books on classic radio series she likes!
Booksteve recommends.
Buy it direct here at a discounted price!
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