The Cinnamon Bear
The Show That Invented a Holiday Tradition
Most radio serials ran their course and faded. The Cinnamon Bear did something different: it became a seasonal institution, broadcast somewhere in the world every holiday season from 1937 onward. The Metropolitan Washington Old-Time Radio Club has documented that unbroken run, and it's easy to understand why. The series told a single continuous story across 26 fifteen-minute chapters, designed to air daily from just before Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve — an exact fit for the Advent calendar that no other program had quite managed.
The show began as a commercial project. A group of merchants, led by Portland, Oregon's Lipman-Wolfe & Company department store, commissioned writer Glanville Heisch to create a radio serial tied to their Christmas promotions. The entire story, songs included, was written in six weeks — Heisch working alongside his wife, Elisabeth A. Heisch. The producers gave him a clear model: write something in the tradition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The result was produced by Transco (Transcription Company of America) in Hollywood and first broadcast between November 26 and December 25, 1937. Portland stations debuted it a day early, on Thanksgiving itself.
The Lipman's connection ran deep. The store ran a newspaper advertisement on November 25, 1937, introducing Paddy O'Cinnamon as "Santa Claus's right-hand man," and featured the Cinnamon Bear character in its stores at Christmas time from the 1940s through the 1980s — standing alongside Santa Claus as a figure children could address their Christmas wishes to. Many Portland children wrote their Christmas letters to the Cinnamon Bear rather than to Santa. When Lipman's was acquired and rebranded as Frederick & Nelson, the store-appearance tradition continued. The character eventually became a souvenir fixture at Portland's Fifth Avenue Suites, and malls across the country hosted a Cinnamon Bear figure of their own. In Chicago, Wieboldt's Department Store sponsored the show on WGN and eventually produced a 1951 puppet television version using the original radio recordings as soundtrack — though no kinescopes from that production are known to have survived.
What the Story Is
Judy and Jimmy Barton are ten-year-old twins who go up to the attic to find the Silver Star, the ornament that traditionally goes on top of their Christmas tree. There they meet Paddy O'Cinnamon, a four-inch stuffed bear with shoe-button eyes and a green ribbon around his neck, who has come to life. Paddy introduces himself in a song — his theme — describing his growl as merely a "cinnamon bark." Almost immediately, the Crazy Quilt Dragon steals the Silver Star and escapes to a place called Maybeland. Paddy teaches the children to "de-grow," shrinking them to his own four-inch height, and they enter the world of make-believe through a crack in the wall.
The chase takes them across a lot of imaginative geography. Paddy's airplane runs on soda pop gasoline. The route passes through Looking Glass Valley, across the Root Beer Ocean, through the land of the Inkaboos (where trespassing is punishable by being thrown into a large black inkwell), into the Wishing Woods, and through Marshmallow Meadows. Along the way the Silver Star changes hands repeatedly — a Roly-Poly Policeman on Magic Island has taken it for his uniform before the Dragon runs off with it again; magic instructions from Queen Melissa can only be read in total darkness; Snapper Snitch the Crocodile swallows those instructions, explaining that he reads by eating. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger, and the story ultimately reaches the North Pole, where Santa Claus himself enters the quest. The Silver Star is returned in time for Christmas.
The original songs are named throughout the serial — "Never Say Boo to a Crazy Quilt Dragon," "The Wailing Whale," "The Cockleburr Cowboys from Lollypop Hill" — composed by Don Honrath with lyrics by Heisch and performed by the Paul Taylor Quartet, with orchestration by Felix Mills.
The Cast
The ensemble Transco assembled in Hollywood was large, and identifying all of them took decades. The 26-chapter format called for doubled and tripled roles, and several of the voices behind those parts went on to long careers in radio and television.
Buddy Duncan voiced Paddy O'Cinnamon. Barbara Jean Wong played Judy Barton. Wong was thirteen at the time of recording and already an experienced radio performer — she had begun working in the medium at age five and was known in the industry as "the Chinese Shirley Temple." She attended the Mar-Ken Professional School for Children as a classmate of Mickey Rooney and later trained at the Fanchon and Marco School of the Theater. The Cinnamon Bear was among her earliest radio credits; she later became best known in old-time radio for playing Arbadella Jones, Amos's daughter, on Amos 'n' Andy from 1940 through Christmas Eve 1959. After retiring from acting, Wong earned a teaching credential from Cal State Los Angeles and taught elementary school in Los Angeles for 23 years, retiring in 1992. She died November 13, 1999, in Tarzana, California.
Verna Felton played Mother Barton; Joseph Kearns, the Crazy Quilt Dragon; Hanley Stafford, Snapper Snitch the Crocodile. Howard McNear took two roles, Samuel the Seal and Slim Pickins the Cowboy, and Cy Kendall doubled as Captain Taffy the Pirate and the Indian Chief. Gale Gordon handled Weary Willie the Stork and Oliver Ostrich. Elliott Lewis played both Mr. Presto the Magician and Mudley. Elvia Allman was Penelope the Pelican, Lou Merrill played Santa Claus, Frank Nelson took Captain Tin Top, Ted Osborne played Professor Whiz the Owl, Joe Du Vai was Fe Fo the Giant, Martha Wentworth played the Wintergreen Witch, and Rosa Barcelo played Queen Melissa. Bud Hiestand served as narrator and appeared in several roles. Lindsay MacHarrie, who also directed the series, played Wesley the Whale and additional parts.
Producers deliberately withheld the names of the actors playing the three central characters — Judy, Jimmy, and Paddy — sending a promotional record to radio stations stating they wanted listeners to think of them only as the characters themselves. That decision had a lasting consequence: the actor playing Jimmy Barton went unidentified for more than 80 years. Fans and researchers proposed candidates including Walter Tetley and Tommy Carr. In 2021, researcher Karl Schadow found conclusive evidence in Library of Congress records that Jimmy was played by Bobby La Manche, a Transco stock company member. Schadow published his findings in the September 2021 issue of Hollywood360 Newsletter. Frank Nelson — who had played Captain Tin Top — was instrumental in supplying the original cast list for researchers, as was SPERDVAC, the old-time radio society of Southern California.
A footnote worth making: both Gale Gordon and Joseph Kearns later appeared together on the 1959 television series Dennis the Menace — Kearns as George Wilson, with Gordon under contract to play John Wilson following Kearns's death.
Syndication and the Portland Connection
When the series launched, it ran on two Portland stations simultaneously: KALE at 6:00 p.m. and KXL at 7:00 p.m. National syndication through Transco expanded the broadcast, but the operation wasn't entirely smooth. When syndication problems arose at Transco, the show went dark officially in 1940, though some stations may have aired earlier transcriptions that year; Portland had no broadcast. In 1941, Transco's programming was sold to Broadcasters Program Syndicate and the series returned to national syndication — and kept returning every subsequent holiday season.
Portland maintained its particular attachment to the show well beyond the radio era. ICAN Radio airs episodes daily at noon and 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time each December, and K103 and Kool 99.1 continue annual broadcasts in Oregon. Elsewhere, WDOR-FM in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin airs episodes daily at 4:00 p.m. in the weeks before Christmas; WVIZ-DT9 in Cleveland broadcasts from Thanksgiving through Christmas; and WCSF-FM in Joliet, Illinois runs the series as part of its Spirit of Christmas music marathon from Thanksgiving Day through January 2. The Cinnamon Bear Brigade — an advocacy organization claiming 400 members nationwide and based in Portland — started an annual newsletter called Bear Facts in 1987, on the show's 50th anniversary; it ran for five years. Portland Spirit Cruises launched a Cinnamon Bear Cruise in 2005, and after a pause during the COVID-19 pandemic, the cruise celebrated its 19th year in 2024, featuring characters including Queen Melissa, the Cinnamon Bear, the Crazy Quilt Dragon, Jack Frost, and Captain Taffy.
After 1937
The 26-episode format held up well enough that it attracted a complete remake in 2021. Audible released Cinnamon Bear: A Holiday Adventure as a serialized podcast running November 29 to December 23, 2021, adapted by Eric Gilliland and directed by David Cromer. The cast included Alan Cumming as the Cinnamon Bear, Ryan Reynolds as Santa Claus, Sarah Vowell as Judy, Milo Manheim as Jimmy, John Goodman as Presto the Magician, Stephen Root as the Crazy Quilt Dragon, Martha Plimpton as the Wintergreen Witch, Catherine Keener as Penelope the Pelican, Helen Hunt as Professor Wiz the Owl, Johnny Galecki as Fee-Fo the Giant, Thomas Lennon as Oliver Ostrich, Rachel Dratch as Wearie Winnie, Ana Gasteyer, and Marcia Gay Harden as Mom. The musical score was composed by James Fearnley, a founding member of The Pogues.
The story has also been adapted for the stage and produced as a children's book — The Cinnamon Bear in the Adventure of the Silver Star, published in 2007 on the show's 70th anniversary, written by Rick Lewis and Veronica Marzilli with illustrations by Jerrel McQueen and Timothy Holmes. Radio historian Martin Grams, Jr. noted that a proposed serial by Carlton E. Morse, Timothy John — featuring a teddy bear who spoke with an Irish accent — was evidently inspired by the original series. Hollywood 360 released a recording drawn from the original masters in collaboration with the Heisch estate, ensuring the 1937 production retains a presence beyond worn syndication transcriptions. The entire run of 26 episodes totals approximately five hours and twenty minutes of audio.