Welcome to a new Wildcard Wednesday, on a Tuesday! Tomorrow, my coverage of Community will officially begin. But before that happens, I thought it would be fun to call back to one of the first school-set sitcoms — a little 1950s staple called Our Miss Brooks. 

A classic on both radio and TV — which you can read a lot more about in my book, Great American Sitcoms of the 1950s — Our Miss Brooks has been featured quite a bit on this blog before, so I’ll spare you all the facts and trivia. Instead, I want to share a nifty artifact — it’s a script for the radio episode that was first broadcast over CBS’ airwaves at 3:30 PM PST on Sunday, November 12, 1950. Often referred to online as “Teachers’ Convention” or “The Convention,” this installment finds Miss Brooks and Miss Enright both scheming to get the other out of town so they can be alone with their mutual crush, the bashful Mr. Boynton. Hear it below.

It’s a straightforward sample of the series and its storytelling (the episode was re-performed on radio in 1955), but this draft is particularly cool because it belonged to Gloria McMillan, who played Harriet Conklin. Her lines are marked — as are, interestingly, Miss Enright’s. (Perhaps Mary Jane Croft had the pages from McMillan’s copy when she stepped up to the mic? Or perhaps a stand-in used them during a technical rehearsal. Who knows?) Also, you’ll see lots of revisions throughout — including added jokes — and notably, a missing tag, for it had not yet been written when McMillan received this draft. Also, there is no page 13. It appears everything from that page was cut except for one line, so McMillan must have trashed it. Interesting, huh? Anyway, for your private intellectual and recreational edification, take a gander at this brief snapshot of vintage sitcommery in process — with Our Miss Brooks!

Stay tuned tomorrow for Community! And next week, come back for another Wildcard!