GALE STORM

BROCKTON, MA., USA – Actress Gale Storm, who won the hearts of millions of American TV viewers in the 1950s as the vivacious young star of two classic shows, My Little Margie and The Gale Storm Show ("Oh, Susanna!"), is set to make a rare local appearance Friday and Saturday as guest star in Massasoit Community College’s 11^th annual Radio Classics Live benefit program.

She’ll be joined onstage by a cavalcade of illustrious broadcast veterans whose work is also known to millions: Will Hutchins (Sugarfoot,, Blondie), Peg Lynch ("Ethel and Albert"), Rosemary Rice ("I Remember Mama"), announcer Fred Foy ("The Lone Ranger"), Arthur Andersen ("Let’s Pretend"), Donald Buka, former Boston TV personalities Barry Nolan and Robin Young ("Evening Magazine"), and local radio personalities Jess Cain (WHDH-AM), Jordan Rich (WBZ-AM), Michele Hughes (WODS-AM), Bob Forrest (WROL-AM), Alice Duffy ("Shear Madness"), Rod Fritz, and sound-effects wizard Ken Carberry.

The program is designed as a re-enactment of a night of NBC radio comedy from the 1940s, staged in a re-creation of an old-fashioned network radio studio. With support from the Massasoit Radio Players the guests will perform episodes from a variety of classic radio and TV shows in which some of them originally took part.

On Friday night they will revisit "My Friend Irma," "Duffy’s Tavern," "Blondie," "Ethel and Albert" and "My Sister Eileen."

On Saturday night the troupe will perform episodes from "My Little Margie," "Fibber McGee and Molly," "Our Miss Brooks," "Ethel and Albert" and the radio drama "Ball of Fire."

"I’ve always felt as if God picked me up and planted me in Hollywood," Storm said in a phone interview from her home in California earlier this week. "I had always been interested in theatrics, but I never would have aspired to a Hollywood film career."

Storm grew up in Houston, Texas, and appeared in a variety of student theatrical productions during her school days. Her life took a decisive turn at the age of 16, when she enrolled as a contestant in a traveling talent showcase staged by Jesse Lasky, one of Hollywood’s pioneering movie producers.

"Two of my schoolteachers absolutely insisted I enter the contest," Storm recalled, "and it changed my life."

Storm won the contest, which led to a trip to Hollywood and a coveted guest spot on an episode of "Gateway to Hollywood," Lasky’s popular Sunday-night radio talent showcase on CBS. On that show she was given the stage name Gale Storm—the name used for all female winners on the show—and she met the love of her life, a talented young performer from Indiana named Lee Bonnell.

"It was very important to me that I win," Storm recalled, "because I had fallen in love with Lee. It definitely was love at first sight. The producers of the show must have known how I felt, because they paired the two of us together on the show. That meant we rehearsed together, and that gave us the chance to get to know each other."

Storm’s successful radio debut led to a film contract with RKO Studios and a part in the feature film "Tom Brown’s School Days," in which she played a 12-year-old girl. "The beauty of that," Storm says, "was that they tutored me for six weeks to develop a British accent for the film, and that helped me tone down my Texas accent. Of course, up until that time I thought it was everyone else who had an accent."

Storm left RKO after appearing in one more feature film, "One Crowded Night," but stayed on in Hollywood and took roles in a string of B-pictures for various other studios. She and Bonnell were married in 1941, and raised four children. Bonnell himself went on to chalk up a number of screen appearances prior to his death in 1986.

As the 1950s dawned Storm found herself in a career slump. Then came another of those unexpected, life-changing career breakthroughs: a phone call from producer Hal Roach Jr., who offered her the title role in the pilot episode of a TV situation comedy titled "My Little Margie." She was to play the devoted daughter of Vernon Albright, a debonair, prosperous widower with an apartment on Fifth Avenue. The part of Margie’s father went to former silent-film leading man Charles Farrell, whom Storm describes today as "the dearest man you would ever want to know."

"I got the script for the pilot, and read it through," Storm recalled, "but for some reason I wasn’t happy with the father-daughter relationship in the story. It may be that I felt they weren’t kind enough to each other. I sent back the script and told the producers how I felt, and I thought that would be the end of it. But they called me again a couple of weeks later and said they had rewritten the script and made changes in the father-daughter relationship. I read the rewritten script, and I loved it."

"My Little Margie" began a three-year run on CBS-TV in June 1952, and viewers across America immediately took the glamorous young star to heart. A radio version of the same series aired on CBS six months later, with Storm and Farrell playing the leads in both series.

In September 1956 Storm starred in "The Gale Storm Show" – more popularly known by its syndication name, "Oh, Susanna!" – as Susanna Pomeroy, the social director of a luxury ocean liner. The show teamed her with actress ZaSu Pitts, a brilliant comedienne in her own right, who received acclaim for her portrayal of Susanna’s close friend Esmeralda "Nugey" Nugent.

Storm says that "ZaSu" was her colleague’s given name, not a stage name, and she is careful to point out that it’s pronounced zay-sue, not zah-sue. "She was named after two aunts – I guess they must have been named Za and Sue," Storm said, laughing.

Since the end of "The Gale Storm Show" in 1960, Storm has devoted herself to her family and to appearances in a wide variety of theatrical productions. In these nostalgia-driven days she is also a frequent guest at collectors’ conventions and other commemorative events around the country, where she is still warmly hailed for her TV roles and her former co-star, ZaSu Pitts, has become a cult favorite.

Last weekend, in fact, Storm was guest of honor at the annual ZaSu Pitts Film Festival in Pitts’ hometown of Parsons, Kansas, an event which Storm says Pitts herself would have loved. A number of Pitts’ feature films were screened at the festival, along with selected episodes from "Oh, Susanna!"

A highlight of the film festival was a screening of Storm’s surprise appearance on a 1955 episode of the popular NBC-TV series "This Is Your Life," in which she had an emotional reunion with Farrell and with the two Houston schoolteachers who had shown so much confidence in her talent as a teen-ager. She says that all those emotions came flooding back to her last weekend as she sat in the audience with the other film fans, reliving the experience 45 years later.