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From the American Scene:
The Real Molly Goldberg
- Abstract
For twenty-five years the affairs of “The Goldbergs,” a fictional Bronx family, occupied the more or less regular attention of a sizable portion of the American public. The saga began on radio in 1929 as a serial, first weekly, then daily, reaching, at its height in the mid-30’s, an estimated ten million persons with each broadcast. In 1946, ‘The Goldbergs” left radio for a Broadway play, Me and Molly. The next year Hollywood made a film of the play, entitled Molly, and the family began its television career, during which its audience occasionally numbered as many as forty million per appearance. The last few years have been rocky, however, the program shifting networks, changing from a daily to a thrice weekly to a weekly schedule, and appearing once as a summer replacement for Bishop Sheen. For a number of seasons it was off the air altogether. Now it has returned to television on film.
Although I never took to the serial on radio, the very first time I saw the family on television I was drawn into its affairs and remained a faithful fan up to its last few months as a live program, when I forgot more and more to turn it on. I wondered whether my own changing response was part of what seemed a more widespread attitude, and to find out about this and about the program generally, I arranged not long ago to talk with Mrs. Gertrude Berg. It is she who created the family and has always written the scripts and played Molly, the matriarchal central figure.
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