Knox Manning (1904-1980)

Charles Knox Manning was born January 17, 1904, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Knox was one of the few actors whose acting career followed another career.

His acting career began in 1939. He was 35 years old. His first job was on NBC Radio (Red Network) as the announcer for the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which starred Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Knox read the commercials for Bromo Quinine cold tablets.

Bromo Quinine was actually an old fashioned Southern folk remedy concocted into a tablet by Edwin Wiley Grove (1850-27), a physician from Bolivar, Tennessee, who started the Paris Medicine Company in Paris, Tennessee, in 1886. The company moved to St. Louis, Missouri, three years later to give the company more credibility. He set up a second company, the Tasteless Quinine Company in Asheville, North Carolina. The Paris Medicine Company became Grove Laboratories in 1935. The Grove family assets were acquired by Bristol Myers in 1942.

Out of the more than 100 movies Knox was in, he actually only acted in ONE of them... Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), in which he played Anton Radcheck (this is the picture above). In all the other movies he was either the unseen narrator or, in costume, as an announcer of some kind. It was what he did, anyway. He made his last movie, Crashing the Water Barrier, in 1956.

After his amazingly short but successful career in motion pictures (17 years), he worked at radio station KDAY in Santa Monica, as announcer and news anchor until his retirement in 1961.

He died of a heart attack at Motion Picture Country Home in the Woodland Hills district of Los Angeles on August 26, 1980. He was 76 years old. With his wife, they had two sons who worked in Top 40 radio in the 1960s.