Hidden links

Eve Arden

Here’s a history exercise. Some of the names below you’ll know, and some you won’t. They all have something in common. Most of you will easily figure out what links them generally, probably long before you get to the end. But there’s also something more specific you can say about them. It’ll be interesting to see whether you can get that part. (Where possible, each name is a clickable link so that you can check an Internet resource if you’re completely stuck.)

Rosemary Rice
Milton Berle
Frank Gallop
Tallulah Bankhead
Sid Caesar
Kirby Grant
Ted Mack
Jackie Gleason
Bea Benaderet
William Frawley
Dagmar
Harry Von Zell
Dorothy Kilgallen
Eddie Cantor
Imogene Coca
Arthur Godfrey
Gale Gordon
Robert Montgomery
Rex Marshall
Ralph Edwards
Joan Davis
Don DeFore
Spencer Williams
Ben Alexander
Eve Arden
Barbara Britton
Georgiana Carhart

Highlight the following paragraph, and the answer will be revealed.

All of the people listed are ... people I remember seeing on national TV in 1952, the year I turned 10 years old. Commercial television started in 1946, and Richmond’s first TV station, WTVR, signed on in 1948. My family got its first black-and-white set, a Philco floor model, in 1950. Television then was younger than the iPod is now. By the time I was 10, I knew that I wanted to work in this new medium, and these were the people I watched, the people who were pioneering television’s early days. They were the first generation, the ones who helped turn TV into an intimate part of our lives. When the second generation, my generation, started working in the business, the first generation taught us how to do it.