Barbara Hale, RIP -- January 30, 2017

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Barbara Hale, who was most famous for playing Perry Mason's secretary Della Street, has passed on.  I didn't watch the show, which was in reruns, but I kept running across it in syndication on various stations.  I often saw the last couple of minutes as I changed channels.  I came to know Raymond Burr from old radio shows and Film Noir.  Barbara Hale had been under contract at RKO and appeared in a lot of movies that weren't very good.  The Boy With Green Hair and Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim were good.  She didn't get a credit in the latter.  Speaking of old time radio, she appeared in movies based on The Great Gildersleeve and Lum and Abner. 

Erle Stanley Gardner 125 -- July 17, 2014

125 years ago today, 17-July-1889, author Erle Stanley Gardner was born in Massachusetts.  He went to Palo Alto High School in California.  He got thrown out of law school, so he taught himself the law and passed the California Bar.  He practiced law, but spent much of his time writing for the pulp magazines like Black Mask.  When he created attorney Perry Mason, Gardner could stop practicing the law.  Mason appeared in a series of movies with Warren William in the 1930s, and then the television show with Raymond Burr in the 1950s.  The television show is still in syndication. 

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