Carlton E. Morse was born in Jennings, LA and became known as the creator of one of the most popular and longest-running radio shows of all time, One Man’s Family.
Morse’s family moved to Sacramento when he was 16. He finished high school in Sacramento and matriculated at the University of California but never completed his degree. He began writing for newspapers, moving through a number of jobs before he was pink-slipped in 1929 when the San Francisco Call and the San Francisco Bulletin merged.
Rather than returning to newspapering, Morse took some radio scripts he’d written to NBC. He was soon working at KGO, the San Francisco outlet of NBC’s Blue Network. Morse wrote for a number of mystery series, but made his name with a program that first aired in 1932.
One Man’s Family was originally a weekly 30-minute soap opera about the Barbour family: father Henry, mother Fanny, and children Paul, Hazel, Claudia, Clifford and Jack. The show was conceived of as something uplifting and positive, focusing on the family unit. The show switched to a daily 15-miute format in 1950 and ran until 1959. One Man’s Family was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.
Morse also created and wrote I Love a Mystery, considered to be another of the best serials ever created for radio. It aired on various networks between 1939 and 1953.
Carlton E. Morse died in 1993 at age 91.