ARTS 052: The Dennis Day Show

Afternoon Radio Theater Sundae

The comparable Dennis Day was born Owen Patrick Eugene McNulty, who grew up in the Bronx area of New York City. He first started singing with Larry Clinton for network radio programs which were then aimed at a collegiate audience and often broadcast from a college campus.

Gene McNulty, as he was then known, came to the attention of Mary Livingston, who was then married to Jack Benny, and upon hearing Gene for the first time, she took his recording to Benny, who then flew to New York to audition the young man. Dennis Day was soon brought on-board to the Jack Benny Show, replacing Benny’s tenor, Kenny Baker. He would remain on the Jack Benny Show until Jack Benny’s death in 1974.

In 1944, as so many of his contemporaries did, Dennis Day served in the armed forces, in the United States Navy until 1946, when he returned to his civilian life and returning to the Jack Benny Show, while performing in his Own show, A Day in the Life of Dennis Day, where he played the same character he portrayed on the Benny show.

On this episode of the Afternoon Radio Theater Sundae, Pepsi-Mama brings you Dennis Day’s second attempt at his own show, The Dennis Day Show, or the RCA Victor Show, where Day portrayed an older fictionalized version of his Jack Benny character, using his actual voice and behaving more maturely then he did on the Jack Benny Show.

You can now catch the Afternoon Radio Theater Sundae Podcast on it’s own podcast feed, so if you on’y wish to subscribe to the Afternoon Radio Theater Sundae podcast, just follow the link below:

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Join Monica Jones and her crew, on The Afternoon Radio Theatre Sundae on Whose Blind Life is it Anyway, every Sundays, at 2:00 pm (EST), 11:00 am (PST), and with no distracting images to focus on, it will simply take you away to faraway lands, distant times and to meet interesting people, all using your imagination.