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Our Miss Brooks, an American situation comedy, starred Eve Arden as a sardonic high school English teacher. It began as a radio show which lasted from 1948 to 1957, migrating to television (1952-1956) and becoming one of the still-new medium's earliest hits.

Contents 1 Characters 2 Radio 3 Television 4 Awards and Recognition 5 Movie 6 References 7 External links

• Connie Brooks, an English teacher at fictional Madison High School.
• Osgood Conklin (Gale Gordon), blustery, gruff, and unsympathetic Madison High principal, a near-constant pain to his faculty and students. (Conklin was played by Joseph Forte in the show's first episode; Gordon succeeded him for the rest of the series' run.
• Walter Denton (Richard Crenna, billed at the time as Dick Crenna), a Madison High student, well-intentioned and clumsy, with a nasally high, cracking voice, often driving Miss Brooks (his self-professed favourite teacher) to school in a broken-down jalopy.
• Philip Boynton (Jeff Chandler, billed sometimes under his birth name Ira Glossel), Madison High biology teacher, the shy and often clueless object of Miss Brooks' affections.
• Margaret Davis (Jane Morgan), Miss Brooks' absentminded landlady, whose two trademarks are a cat named Minerva and a penchant for whipping up exotic and often uneatable breakfasts.
• Harriet Conklin (Gloria McMillan), Madison High student and daughter of principal Conklin, as well as Denton's girlfriend.
• Stretch Snodgrass (Leonard Smith), dull-witted Madison High athletic star and Walter's best friend.
• Miss Enright (Mary Jane Croft), Madison High English teacher, and a scheming professional and romantic rival to Miss Brooks.
• Jacques Monet (Gerald Mohr), a French teacher.

Our Miss Brooks was a hit on radio from the outset; within eight months of its launch as a regular series, the show landed several honours including four for Eve Arden, who won polls in four individual publications of the time. Arden had actually been the third choice to play the title role. Harry Ackerman, at the time CBS's West Coast director of programming, wanted Shirley Booth for the part, but as he told historian Gerald Nachman many years later, he realised Booth was too focused on the underpaid downside of public school teaching at the time to have fun with the role. ^[1]

Lucille Ball was believed to be the next choice but she was committed already to My Favorite Husband and didn't audition. Then CBS chairman Bill Paley, who was friendly with Arden, persuaded her to audition for the part. With a slightly rewritten audition script---Osgood Conklin, for example, was originally written as a school board president but was now written as the incoming new Madison principal---Arden agreed to give the newly-revamped show a try. ^[2]

Produced by Larry Berns and written by Al Lewis (who also directed the show), Our Miss Brooks premiered on CBS on July 19th, 1948. According to radio critic John Crosby, her lines were very "feline" in dialogic scenes with principal Conklin and would-be boyfriend Boynton, with sharp, witty comebacks. The interplay between the cast---blustery Conklin, nebbish Denton, accommodating Harriet, absentminded Mrs. Davis, clueless Boynton, scheming Miss Enright---also received positive reviews. For its entire radio life, the show was sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive-Peet (later shortened, simply, to Colgate-Palmolive), promoting Palmolive soap, Lustre Creme shampoo, and Toni hair care products.

The radio series continued until 1957, a year after its television life ended.

The show's full cast minus Jeff Chandler (who had become a television star in his own right, in Cochise) played the same characters in the television version, which continued to revolve largely around Connie Brooks's daily relationships with Madison High students, colleagues, and principal. Philip Boynton still made an occasional appearance, played by Robert Rockwell. The television show shifted focus later in its run, however, moving Connie Brooks and Osgood Conklin from a public high school to an exclusive private school. It also changed the title character's romantic focus: Gene Barry was cast as physical education teacher Gene Talbot, and Connie was now the pursued instead of the pursuer.

Our Miss Brooks ran for 154 episodes on television and won an Emmy award before it was cancelled in 1956.

Both the radio and television shows drew as much attention from professional educators as from radio and television fans and viewers and critics. Eve Arden was voted the top ranking radio comedienne in a poll of Radio Mirror listeners in 1948 and 1949 and in a poll of critics by Motion Picture Daily at the end of 1949---but her notices soon expanded beyond her media. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Arden was made an honorary member of the National Education Association and received an award from the Teachers College of Connecticut's Alumni Association (in 1952) "for humanising the American teacher".

Our Miss Brooks was considered groundbreaking 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 considered a realistic character in an unglamorised profession (she often joked, 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 has remained Eve Arden's most identifiable and popular role, with numerous surviving recordings of both the radio and television versions continuing to entertain listeners and viewers. (The surviving radio recordings include both its audition shows.) A quarter century after the show ended, Arden told radio historian John Dunning in an on-air interview just what the show and the role came to mean to her:

• I originally loved the theater. I still do. And I had always wanted to have a hit on Broadway that was created by me. You know, kind of like Judy Holliday and Born Yesterday. And I griped about it a little. And someone said to me, 'Do you realise that, if you had a hit on Broadway, probably a hundred or two hundred thousand people might have seen you in it, if you'd stayed in it long enough. And this way, you've been in Miss Brooks, everybody loves you, and you've been seen by millions.’ So, I figured I'd better shut up while I was ahead.^[3]

In 1956, the cast once more made a transition, this time to feature film. Directed by Al Lewis and written by both him and Joseph Quillan, the movie disregarded the past four years of television and started with a new storyline.

• Arden, Eve The Three Phases of Eve (1985)
• Frank Buxton and Bill Owen, The Big Broadcast 1920-1950 (1971) (New York: Avon Books.)
• Gerald Nachman, Raised on Radio (1998) (New York: Pantheon Books.)
• Wertheim, Arthur Frank, Radio Comedy (1979) Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN 0-19-502481-8

• Our Miss Brooks (31 episodes of Our Miss Brooks)
• Our Miss Brooks television show at the Internet Movie Database
• Our Miss Brooks film at the Internet Movie Database
• The Gale Gordon Archive