Ms. Storm had been a B-movie actress for more than a decade when “My Little Margie” had its premiere on CBS in June 1952 as a summer replacement for the era’s biggest hit series, “I Love Lucy.” Ms. Storm played a young Manhattanite living with her widowed father (Charles Farrell), an affluent businessman, and often trying to keep amorous single women away from him. Critics dismissed the show as silly, but the public disagreed and the series ran for three full seasons.
A year later Ms. Storm returned to television with another sitcom, “The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna.” The title character was a social director on a cruise ship who, with her beautician sidekick (ZaSu Pitts), regularly confounded the ship’s stuffy captain and, every third episode, burst into song (a condition of Ms. Storm’s contract). The show ran from 1956 to 1960.
During the same decade Ms. Storm had a successful recording career, with a gold record for “I Hear You Knockin’ ” and other pop hits including “Teenage Prayer,” “Tell Me Why” and “Dark Moon.”
Carradine, McMahon, Fawcett, Jackson, Mays, Travalena, Storm... WOW!
