Feg Murray: Seein’ Stars

It’s interesting to me that Frederick “Feg” Murray (1894-1973) shares a birthday with Clifton Fadiman, whom we only just wrote about. Both men had hosted radio shows, and Murray turned out a newspaper comic not unlike Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which Fadiman had published in book form.

But there the resemblance stops. Murray was initially renowned as an athlete. While studying art at Stanford, he became captain of the track team. He won national competitions as a hurdler in 1915 and 1916, then served in World War One for two years, first as an ambulance driver (before the U.S. entered) and then as an American infantryman. After the war he coached Stanford’s track team, and then went on to win a bronze medal at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics.

After the dust settled from his athletic career (he was now 26, after all) Murray attended the Art Students League in New York, and then began getting his sports cartoons published in newspapers. In 1934 he became a sports columnist and cartoonist at the Los Angeles Times. From 1933 to 1951 he drew the regular cartoon feature “Seein’ Stars”, which was about Hollywood personalities and was distributed nationally through King Features. In 1938 he became the final host of The Baker’s Broadcast, a radio show sponsored by Fleischmann’s Yeast which had previously been hosted by Joe Penner and Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.

As with Fadiman, I learned about Murray over the course of researching my new book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming soon. Stay tuned for much more, listeners!