Our Miss Brooks, an American situation comedy, began as a radio hit in 1948 and migrated to television in 1952, becoming one of the earlier hits of the so-called Golden Age of Television, and making a star out of Eve Arden (1908-1990) as comely, wisecracking, but humane high school English teacher Connie Brooks.

The show hooked around Connie's daily relationships with Madison High School students, colleagues, and pompous principal Osgood Conklin (Gale Gordon), not to mention favourite student Walter Denton (future television and Rambo co-star Richard Crenna, who fashioned a higher-pitched voice to play the role) and biology teacher Philip Boynton ( Jeff Chandler, known at the time as Ira Grossel), the latter Connie's all-but-unrequited love interest, who saw science everywhere and little else anywhere. Miss Brooks also lived with her absentminded landlady, Mrs. Davis, whose cat Minerva was one of classic radio's few regular animal characters, with a repertoire of meows timed perfectly to various Brooks comments.

Arden's earlier career in hard-boiled film roles informed half her character, but she wedded it neatly to a gentility that rounded both character and actress memorably. She also had a disarming comic timing (she flashed it on Danny Kaye's earlier, short-lived radio show) that made it impossible to conceive the witty Connie in anyone else's hands---but Arden actually wasn't the first choice to play the role. According to Gerald Nachman in Raised on Radio, the show's producer, Harry Ackerman, wanted Shirley Booth, until he realised Booth was so focused on the downside of a teacher's life at the time---being underpaid---that she couldn't make it work as a comic role.

Lucille Ball also turned down the role (she was still committed to her own radio sitcom, My Favorite Husband), ironically enough, considering that Arden would come to be seen as Nachman described her, "the thinking man's Lucy," and Gordon would go on to become Lucy's nemesis in The Lucy Show and Here's Lucy. Eve Arden herself had doubts about the early scripts until CBS president Bill Paley himself persuaded her to take the role.

The show drew as much attention from professional educators as from radio and television listeners, viewers and critics. Eve Arden was voted the top ranking radio comedienne in a poll of Radio Mirror listeners in 1948-1949---but her notices soon expanded beyond her media. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Arden was made an honourary member of the National Education Association, received an award from the Teachers College of Connecticut's Alumni Association (in 1952) "for humanising the American teacher," and even received teaching job offers at the height of the show's popularity.

Jeff Chandler's move to his own television stardom (in Cochise, where he introduced his famous stage name) and to films prompted Robert Rockwell's casting as Philip Boynton for the television version of the show, but the rest of the radio cast made the transition---and Chandler continued playing the role, credited as Ira Grossel and for less money than he earned in films, according to Nachman. On television, Connie Brooks and Osgood Conklin graduated from public high school to an exclusive private school, with future Bat Masterson star Gene Barry joining the cast as physical education teacher Gene Talbot. He also introduced a new romantic twist into Connie Brooks's life: he pursued Connie, previously the persuer of Mr. Boynton.

Written with intelligent wit---and giving Arden a departure from her former image as the heroine's friend---Our Miss Brooks was groundbreaking in its way for showing a woman who was neither a scatterbrained klutz nor a homebody but, rather, a working woman who transcended the actual or assumed limits to women's working lives of the time. Connie Brooks was a realistic character with an unglamorised profession (she often wisecracked, for example, about being underpaid, as many teachers were at the time) who showed women could be competent and self-sufficient outside their home lives without losing their femininity or their humanity.

Our Miss Brooks ran for 154 episodes before the television version was cancelled in 1956; the show's radio life ended a year later. A feature film version of the show was also released, and the original radio show has become a favourite among old-time radio collectors. A decade after Our Miss Brooks finished, Arden became a television star again, teaming with Kaye Ballard in the title roles of the late-1960s series, The Mothers-In-Law. A decade after that, she returned to school as the befuddled principal in the films Grease and Grease 2.

Arden in her autobiography actually downplayed her time as Connie Brooks, but Richard Crenna later told Gerald Nachman that actress and character bore little resemblance to each other in real life. Arden, Crenna remembered, "had a wonderful sense of humour, but I wouldn't say she was particularly sardonic. She never played the comedian offstage---she didn't need to be the funniest person in the room, unlike so many comics, who find it difficult to get off. She went out, got the laughs, and went back to her ranch in the (San Fernando) Valley. She was just a wonderfully unselfish actress, and was just so up all the time; she made you feel good to be around her."

Except that Connie Brooks---sardonic as her portrayer may not have been, pre-feminism liberated as she was---was likewise unselfish and made people feel good to be around her, even when she was clearly enough their superior. That may be why Our Miss Brooks remains Eve Arden's most identifiable and popular role, with numerous surviving recordings of both the radio and television versions entertaining fans even today.

External Links

• Audio Collection of Our Miss Brooks Radio Shows

References

• Eve Arden, Three Faces of Eve (1988)
• Gerald Nachman, Raised on Radio (1998)
• Arthur Frank Wertheim, Radio Comedy (1979)

Sitcoms | American radio | American television | American actresses | Radio comedy | American radio programs | 1950s TV shows in the United States | 1956 films