Front and Center
A Summer Slot With Some Serious Star Power
Front and Center ran for only a few weeks in the summer of 1947, but the guest list alone tells you this was no throwaway program. Dorothy Lamour — the Paramount Pictures star known for the "Road to…" films with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope — served as host and headline performer for the entire run on NBC Radio, holding down the slot that Fred Allen vacated when he took his summer vacation. Three episodes survive in this catalog, and between them you get Edward G. Robinson, Gary Moore, Burns and Allen, Ronald Reagan, Van Johnson, and Alan Young. That's a remarkable concentration of Hollywood and radio talent for a show that lasted less than two months.
The format was a straightforward celebrity-guest variety hour: sketches, interviews, and musical performances, with Lamour steering things along and the male vocal quartet The Crew Chiefs providing musical support. The guest lineup rotated each week while Lamour remained the constant. She was well suited to the role — she'd done extensive radio work before Front and Center, including appearances on The Chase and Sanborn Hour, and she handled both the comedy and the musical numbers with ease.
The Army Air Force Connection
The show had an unusual backer for a Hollywood-flavored variety program: the U.S. Army Air Force sponsored Front and Center as a recruitment vehicle, aimed at boosting enlistment. That context shaped the show's patriotic framing even as it delivered the kind of entertainment listeners expected from a top-tier NBC summer replacement.
The combination of a genuine Hollywood personality as host, an A-list rotating guest roster, and military sponsorship gave Front and Center a more polished feel than the typical summer fill-in. The show ran from July 20 through at least August 10, 1947, with the final episode in the catalog pairing Lamour with Ronald Reagan, George Burns, and Gracie Allen — a lineup that would have been a headliner anywhere on the NBC schedule, not just a summer placeholder.
What Came Next for Lamour
Front and Center turned out to matter for Dorothy Lamour's radio career. Her work on the show led directly to her being hired as host of the Sealtest Variety Theater beginning in the fall of 1948, a more prominent and longer-running assignment. For a brief summer program, that's a meaningful legacy — it functioned, in effect, as an extended audition that demonstrated Lamour could anchor a variety show on her own, not just appear as a guest.
Lamour was born Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton on December 10, 1914, and died September 22, 1996. Front and Center sits in the middle of her radio career, after the wartime peak of her Paramount fame and before the Sealtest run that would give her a sustained presence on the air. The three episodes in this catalog offer a compact window into what that brief but well-stocked summer experiment actually sounded like.