I know absolutely nothing about this recording. It’s a record that my grandpa made for himself, with just a handwritten label. As you may have guessed, it’s the stories of Jack and the Beanstalk and Rumpelstiltskin.
The stories are great fun. If anyone out there has any idea who the storyteller is, I’d love to know!
The narrartor is either Hal Peary or Willard Waterman. Peary created the character of Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve (note ther reference to the name “Throckmorton” in the Rumplestiltskin story) on “The Fibber McGee and Molly Show” and the character was later spun off onto his own program “The Great Gilversleeve” in 1941. When Peary left the program in 1950 he was replaced by Waterman, who could do the Gildersleeve voice almost indistinguishably from Peary. Since you say your grandfather made these recordings in the mid-1940s when Peary was still playing Gildersleeve (and the stories are done in the Gildersleeve voice with the tradmark laugh) it is virtually certain it was Peary.
Thank you for that information, Nemo!
Good information in Nemo’s post. Based on my childhood memories of listening to these records, I would have just said the narrator was The Great Gildersleeve, never realizing(or thinking about) until reading the post that Gilderlseeve was just the name of a character. Lisa, you may come across other children’s stories also, but our favorites were Jack and the Beanstalk and Rumpelstiltskin. As kids, Uncle Doc and I could(and did) recite most of the dialogue right along with the record. “Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum I smell the blood of an Englishman, be he alive or be he dead I’ll grind his bones to make my bread” “‘AND THIS TIME I MEAN IT!”