A Busy Brown

Some of the top radio actors on the West Coast found uncredited regular employment on the Jack Benny show. Two that come to mind are Herb Vigran and Elvia Allman. And a couple of the top radio actors on the East Coast did the same.

When Fred Allen went off the air for health reasons at the end of the 1942-43 season, Jack “borrowed” two actors who appeared regularly in Allen’s Alley—John Brown and Minerva Pious. It is still odd to my ears hearing the Pansy Nussbaum voice given to other characters on Benny’s show (the Grape Nuts era is not my favourite period) but Brown fits in quite well. Two roles that come to mind are an enthusiastic NBC usher who sings about Grape Nuts Flakes to the Rinso White jingle, and as a clueless Vancouverite who hasn’t heard of the city’s tourist attractions.

Brown, whose Alley character was New Yorker John Doe, returned during Allen’s last season in a promotional appearance for The Life of Riley as Digger O’Dell, the Friendly Undertaker, perhaps his best-known radio role (he used the Doe and O’Dell voices in the Tex Avery cartoon Symphony in Slang).

Here’s a profile of Brown from the New York Herald Tribune of Dec. 7, 1941. Brown talks about television, which was already filling the air with civil defence programming. That would dominate the tube in New York during shortened broadcast days while the war was on.

Protean Artist Of Radio Finds Doormen Cold
John Brown, Who Performs in 7 Shows Weekly, Still Is a Stranger at Studios
By Elizabeth S. Colelough
John Brown, one of radio’s funniest straight men, is a man of parts—and that is not intended as a joke. At present, he is playing in seven regular radio shows and has a list of successes behind him as long as the evils of mankind. His schedule taken from Sunday to Sunday runs something like this:
As Shrievy, the cab driver for Dr. Watson, he maintains the comedy interest in “The Shadow,” chiller-thriller heard on WOR at 5:30 p. m. every Sunday. In “Lorenzo Jones” he enacts the role or Jim Baker at 4:30 p. m., on WEAF from Monday to Friday.
On Tuesday he contributes his services to the “Treasury Hour” over WJZ at 8 p. m. Every Wednesday, the high point of his week, he is Mr. Average Wise Guy and other comic-relief characters in the Mighty Allen Art Players on Fred Allen’s programme. He has been with Allen’s show since it sprang, like a low—comedy Minerva, from the Allen cranium in 1934.
Figured in “Feud”
Brown unwittingly has become an innocent figure in one of the chapters of the Fred Allen-Jack Benny “feud.” Benny once presented an autographed photograph to Brown on which was inscribed “How long are you going to be with Allen?” Allen constantly accuses Benny of trying to steal Brown from him. Whenever he brings his show to New York or Brown goes to the coast Benny finds a part for him. When asked why he wouldn’t take Benny’s offer he said: “I like New York. I have a house in Croton—and, besides, I don’t want to leave Fred.” That, you feel, is the real reason.
Thursdays he plays the high school principal in the “Aldrich Family” on WEAF at 5:30 p. m.
Brown ends his week with two Saturday morning shows, “Lincoln Highway” and “Vaudeville Theater,” both on WEAF.
One of the busiest and most sought-after actors in radio, he find[s] it hard to get time off for a vacation. He had his first, two weeks, last summer, and that took plenty of finagling and adjusting. He had to be written out of eight shows. One script writer forgot and put him in. That almost ended the vacation before it began.
Brown has worked as straight man or stooge for virtually every top comic on the air. Among them are Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Jack Haley, Ed Gardner, Al Jolson, Ken Murray, Robert Benchley, Jerry Lester, Rudy Vallee, Fanny Brice and many others. On Oct. 30 he was Lord Beaverbrook’s voice on the ‘March of Time.”
Though many times a featured player, Brown has never been starred in a radio show. He is almost too versatile. He is like the department-store saleswoman who was so good in her job and brought so much money to the store that she never was promoted. However, he likes his life. In appearance he is unassuming. He says he looks less like an actor than any one he knows. Sandy-haired and quiet-mannered, he looks like hundreds of Americans you see every day in the subway and on the street. His sense of humor is keen. His blue eyes shine as he tells a joke on himself. Eddie Cantor, he said, once told him, “You look like a grocer, but you’re the best actor in radio.” Even though he has been in radio for eight years and has ridden miles in N. B. C. elevators, the page boys still ask him for tickets of admission. They won’t believe he works there.
Born In England
Brown was born in Hull, England, on April 4, 1904, began his education in London, continued it in Melbourne, Australia, and finished it in New York public schools. He now is an American citizen.
His first job was that of secretary to Frank Campbell, of the Funeral Church. He had several secretarial jobs after that, but was graduated in due course to office manager with a music-publishing firm. From there he went to real estate selling, and later became a counselor at boys’ camps. It is impossible to follow Brown’s career step by step. Before going into stock and the Broadway theater, he worked in summer resorts and various little-theater enterprises.
His personal life is happy. He is married to June White, former stage actress, and has two children—a girl, 1 1/2 years old, and a boy, 5. They live in a rambling old house overlooking the Hudson at Croton, N. Y. While he was courting the present Mrs. Brown, he sent her a telegram when she opened in the Broadway play, “Achilles Had a Heel.” It read in part, “And so has June.” She married him anyway.
Foresees Television
He feels that stage experience is valuable in radio work, but not essential. He cited the case of Ann Thomas, Goodman Ace’s pert secretary, who tried out for a part in a Broadway show lost season. She “fell into the part so easily at the first reading that the director and producer were amazed. Radio actors have to fit into parts on short notice—no six weeks’ rehearsal to smooth off the corners. He also believes they have the edge on their stage brethren because they are not typed so rigidly.
“What do you think about the average radio actor when television hits its stride?” the interviewer asked. “Any actor who doesn’t investigate or isn’t ready for it is crazy,” he said. “The change will be as revolutionary as the evolution of the silent movies into sound.
“Radio brass hats will have another problem also,” he continued. “They will have to figure out some way for the housewife to watch the shows while she cooks and cleans. The daytime show will be the biggest problem. I don’t know how they will solve it but I know television will bring an entirely new technique into the radio field.”

There is another connection with Jack Benny. Brown appeared, uncredited, in Benny’s self-trashed film The Horn Blows At Midnight in 1945. The same year, he was in Allen’s It’s in the Bag. He had a connection with Jack once-removed; he had a regular role on Dennis Day’s radio show. A list of his credits would be impossible, but I’ll mention one other. He was the lazy boyfriend Al on My Friend Irma; creator Cy Howard told a fan magazine how Brown would get miffed for pulling him away from poker games with Lud Gluskin’s musicians during rehearsals (Howard semi-joked Brown likely made more money than he did).

When television “hit its stride,” Brown was there, playing Harry Morton on the Burns and Allen show in 1951. Then, he wasn’t playing Harry Morton. Brown got caught in the blacklist. He had been named in Red Channels the previous June. Historian Liz McLeod relates:

Brown's "Red Channels" dossier, found on page 30, consists of precisely two items: he participated in three events sponsored by the Progressive Citizens of America in 1947, and he signed an Amicus Curiae brief seeking a review of the convictions of two members of the Hollywood Ten.

He appeared before a House Un-American Activities Subcommittee in November 1953. He plead the Fifth Amendment. At the time, he was appearing as Thorny on the radio version of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. His union, AFTRA, caved in to the witch-hunters. The following February, despite denials he was a Communist Party member, and taking the union’s loyalty oath, he was told he would be suspended if he didn’t testify before the Committee in 90 days. His career was over.

You’d never know any of this reading his obituaries in Variety or the Associated Press or United Press, or Ozzie Nelson’s autbiography. There is no mention of it. Several obits pointed out his time on the Benny and Allen shows. He died of a heart attack in 1957 at the age of 53.