Peggy King, 1930 - 2026

“Pretty Perky Peggy King,” a big band singer and sometimes actress, died on Oct. 25 in Wynnewood, PA (hey, right next to my home town!). She was 96. King began singing on the radio, and soon was snapped up by several bands: Charlie Spivak, Ralph Flanagan, and Ray Anthony. She was a regular on George Gobel’s and Mitch Miller’s TV shows, recorded several albums, and appeared on just about every TV variety show of the 1950s. King sang in the films Torch Song, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, and had non-singing roles in Dragnet, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, Maverick, and Zero Hour! (as the stewardess, later parodied by Lorna Patterson in Airplane!). “There was always a teenage quality to my voice,” King told writer Marc Myers. “I like that people thought I sounded like the girl next door. That’s the way I was portrayed on George’s show. I might add, George [Gobel] was the dearest man in show business. He wasn’t in love with himself. The first month we were on, when people in the press were calling me and my picture was in one of those Hollywood magazines, George said, ‘You’re really getting famous.’ He never felt angry or envious. He knew that the more popular I became, the more popular his show would become.” She added that “Jack Benny was my favorite. The strange thing is he was anything but tight with his money. He was a very generous guy. I did a five-week tour with him. He thought I was a good straight-man. It was hard not to laugh at Jack.”

You Came a Long Way from St. Louis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzQXv9rFyG8&list=RDKzQXv9rFyG8&start_radio=1