The Goldbergs
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Goldbergs was a comedy-drama broadcast from 1929 to 1946 on American radio and later seen as a television situation comedy (1949-56).
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[edit] "Yoo-hoo! Is anybody?"
The program was devised by writer-actress Gertrude Berg in 1928 and sold to the NBC radio network the following year. It was a domestic comedy featuring the home life of a Jewish family in New York City. In addition to writing the scripts and directing each episode, Berg starred as bighearted, lovingly meddlesome matriarch Molly Goldberg. The show began as a portrait of Jewish tenement life before later evoking such growing pains as moving into a more suburban setting and struggling with assimilation while sustaining their roots.
The Goldbergs began as a weekly 15-minute program called The Rise of the Goldbergs on November 20, 1929, going daily in 1931. The series moved to CBS in 1936 with the title shortened to The Goldbergs. Like other 15-minute comedies of the day, such as Amos 'n' Andy, Lum and Abner, Easy Aces, Vic and Sade and Myrt and Marge, The Goldbergs was a serial offering with running storylines. And Berg's usual introduction---in character as Molly, hollering, "Yoo-hoo! Is anybody?"---became an instant catch phrase. In the 1940s it was followed by future TV game host Bud Collyer warbling, "There she is, folks--that's Molly Goldberg, a woman with a place in every heart and a finger in every pie."
The show was so popular for many years that fans wrote letters to the show's characters, as well as the performers. When Gertrude Berg missed a couple of weeks due to illness, stations carrying the show were flooded with get-well mail. At the height of the show's popularity, Life wrote:
- For millions of Americans, listening to The Goldbergs... has been a happy ritual akin to slipping on a pair of comfortable old shoes that never seem to wear out.
Radio historians Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, in The Big Broadcast 1920-1950, noted that The Goldbergs, which could have been considered a soap opera as much as a comedy, noted that it "differed from most of the other 'soaps' in that its leading characters lived through relatively normal situations. Even though it was the sotry of a poor Jewish family in New York, it had identification for a wide segment of listeners."
Berg seems to have been very much aware of that image and was careful not to allow abrupt changes to the show. Of the 15-minute serial comedies, only Amos 'n' Andy enjoyed a longer radio life than The Goldbergs. She even resisted recasting the role of husband Jake Goldberg after James R. Waters, the actor who played the role on radio, died suddenly in 1945. Berg simply had Molly refer to Jake, occasionally setting up dialogue in which his reply was not heard when she spoke to him.
[edit] The serious side
Berg was not averse to incorporating serious real-world issues that affected Jewish families. One 1939 episode addressed Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany (including a rock through the family window as the Goldbergs made their Passover Seder); other World War II-era episodes alluded to friends or family members trying to escape the Holocaust. But these were sporadic deviations from the show's main theme of family, neighborhood and the balance between old world values and new world assimilation.
The Goldbergs was so popular that performing stars in other arts sought to appear on it. Berg consented, for example, to cast Metropolitan Opera star Jan Peerce almost annually to sing on Yom Kippur and Passover; another famous singer of the day, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, asked Berg directly if she could appear, and Berg wrote her into three episodes. As ethnically-rooted as it was, The Goldbergs had universal appeal during the years of the Great Depression and beyond; their situations were normal enough even with the family's distinctly Jewish absurdism.
The radio cast included Roslyn Silber and Alfred Ryder as children Rosalie and Sammy, Menasha Skulnik as Uncle Davis, Arnold Stang (later famous as the voice of Top Cat) as Seymour Fingerhood, Garson Kanin as Eli Edwards, and Zina Provendie as Sylvia Allison, among others. In 1948, Berg wrote and staged a theatrical version of the show on Broadway, Molly and Me. A year later, she brought The Goldbergs to television.
[edit] Small screen, big headache
The television version ran on CBS Television from 1949 to 1951 and co-starred Philip Loeb as Jake Goldberg. He and Gertrude Berg reprised their roles in a 1950 film of the same name. The show almost didn't get to the small screen at all: CBS executives were uncertain that the show would work on television as well as it did on radio. Berg prevailed, however, and picked up General Foods as its sponsor.
The Goldbergs was destined to spend almost a decade on television---but not without disruptions. In 1950, Philip Loeb was blacklisted and pressure was placed on Berg (who owned the television version as she had the radio original) to fire him. When she refused, CBS dropped it from their schedule by June 1951.
Eight months later, however NBC---the show's original broadcasting home---picked up the series for the 1952-53 season (with another re-naming, to Molly, in due course), with Harold Stone and then Robert H. Harris replacing Loeb as Jake. The rest of the television cast included Eli Mintz as Uncle David, Tom Taylor as Sammy, Arlene McQuade as Rosalie, Betty Bendyke as Dora Barnett, Susan Steel as Daisy Carey, and Jon Lormer as Henry Carey. On radio, Sammy and Rosalie had grown up and gotten married; on television, the characters were revived as teenagers.
In 1954, the show moved to the faltering DuMont network for a summer run. The shows were live, but a final version was filmed in 1955, moving the Goldbergs from the Bronx to the New York suburb of Haverville. That same year, Philip Loeb, beset by depression and unable to find other work, committed suicide.
[edit] Aftermath
Gertrude Berg returned to television six years later in a situation comedy, Mrs G. Goes to College, playing Sarah Green, a Molly Goldberg-like character. Despite being retitled The Gertrude Berg Show in mid-year, the program was cancelled after one season. Today, The Goldbergs are available to collectors and fans in a large number of surviving radio episodes and some surviving television episodes. The Ciesla Foundation in Washington, DC is currently working on a documentary about Gertrude Berg's impact on television titled Gertrude Berg: America's Molly Goldberg, directed by Aviva Kempner.
