Red Skelton Show 1942 -- 20 Daylight Saving Time

Red Skelton’s radio career ran from 1938 to 1953. The show people usually mean when they say “the Red Skelton Radio Show” is his own half-hour weekly comedy-variety program that premiered October 7, 1941 on NBC as The Raleigh Cigarette Program (also billed as The Red Skelton Scrapbook of Satire). It ran, with one long wartime break, until May 26, 1953. It was one of the top-rated comedy shows of the 1940s, often sitting in the Hooper top ten alongside Bob Hope and Fibber McGee and Molly. For years it aired Tuesday nights at 10:30, immediately after Hope’s Pepsodent Show — a brutal and useful lead-in. How he got there Skelton’s first national radio appearance was August 12, 1937 on Rudy Vallee’s Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour. The “Doughnut Dunkers” routine and his ad-libs landed so well that listeners wrote in demanding him back. On October 1, 1938 he replaced country singer Red Foley as host of NBC’s Avalon Time, with his first wife and manager Edna Stillwell on the cast. Those episodes did not use the famous character gallery. Each show was built around a “famous Skelton ancestor” (Christopher Columbus Skelton, Napoleon Bonaparte Skelton, Marco Polo Skelton, and so on). He left late in 1939 as the MGM film career took off.