Dudley Manlove (1914-96)

Dudley Devere Manlove (yes, it was his real name!) was born June 11, 1914, in Oakland, California, into a family that worked part of the year in vaudeville. Not a very wealthy family, but hard working, he was able to get singing, dancing, and piano lessons from colleagues of his parents. He worked on the vaudeville circuit himself through his mid 20s, when he got a position of staff announcer at radio station KPO in San Francisco.

Most OTR aficionados remember Dudley Manlove as the announcer on the NBC West Coast detective series, Candy Matson.

After Candy Matson went off the air, Manlove moved to Los Angeles to try his hand at motion pictures. Through his association with Monty Masters of the Candy Matson show, he befriended Jack Webb, who used Manlove for several of his radio shows and for the Dragnet TV show, as well as other work in television. He was also famous for his Lux soap commercials.

He also met Edward D. Wood, Jr., said to be the worst Hollywood film director/producer/writer of all time. Manlove did four of Wood's projects, including Plan IX from Outer Space (where the picture attached to this entry came from), in which he played the alien Eros.

Manlove was a staff announcer at the old NBC Radio City at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood. He retired before that building was razed in the mid 1960s. He died on April 17, 1996, at the age of 81, in San Bernardino, ironically, the city that was attacked in Plan IX from Outer Space.