Gertrude Berg

Gertrude Berg, born Tillie Edelstein on October 3, 1899, in the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, was an American actress, writer, and producer whose Broadway career extended from 1948 to 1963. Her parents, Jacob and Dinah Edelstein, were natives of Russia and England, respectively. She grew up on Lexington Avenue and first encountered theatrical production while staging skits at her father's resort in the Catskill Mountains town of Fleischmanns, New York. In 1918 she married Lewis Berg, with whom she had two children, Cherney and Harriet.

Berg's path to radio began after a fire destroyed the sugar factory where her husband worked. She developed a semi-autobiographical script depicting a Jewish family in a Bronx tenement, writing it by hand and reading it aloud to an NBC executive who could not decipher her handwriting. That performance secured both the program and her role as its lead actress. On November 20, 1929, the first 15-minute episode of The Rise of the Goldbergs aired on NBC, with Berg earning $75 per week at the outset. Within two years, during the Great Depression, a sponsor offered her $2,000 per week. She wrote nearly all of the more than 5,000 radio episodes herself, continuing to compose scripts in pencil for the duration of the program's run. The show's first-season scripts were later published in book form.

Through the character of Molly Goldberg, a warm-hearted matriarch whose family eventually relocated from the Bronx to Connecticut, Berg explored the experiences of first-generation Jewish immigrants working to assimilate into American life. After considerable negotiation, she brought The Goldbergs to CBS television in 1949, a program that has since been credited as the first TV sitcom. In 1951, Berg received the inaugural Emmy Award for Lead Actress in a Television Series, having played the role for two decades by that point.

The program encountered serious difficulties during the McCarthy era when co-star Philip Loeb was named in Red Channels, a publication identifying alleged Communist influence in broadcasting. The show's primary sponsor, General Foods, demanded Loeb's dismissal. Berg resisted that pressure for a year and a half, but General Foods and Sanka ultimately withdrew their sponsorship, and CBS dropped the series in June 1951. NBC picked up the program, and Loeb resigned in January 1952. The Goldbergs continued on television until 1954, after which Berg wrote and produced a syndicated film version comprising 39 episodes, which aired on some stations under the title Molly.

During the 1950s and early 1960s Berg made several television guest appearances, including an episode of The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom, a February 1958 episode of The Ford Show Starring Tennessee Ernie Ford, and three appearances as the mystery guest on What's My Line in 1954, 1960, and 1961. In 1961 she starred in the Four Star Television sitcom Mrs. G. Goes to College, later retitled The Gertrude Berg Show, playing a 62-year-old widow who enrolls in college. The series was cancelled after one season.

Berg's Broadway credits included Me and Molly, which she also wrote, A Majority of One, and Dear Me, The Sky is Falling. Her performance in A Majority of One, a comedy, earned her the 1959 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play, making her one of the rare performers to hold both a Tony and an Emmy for lead acting. In 1961 she received the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theater, and that same year she published a memoir, Molly and Me. In 1965 she released a spoken-word album, How to Be a Jewish Mother, on the Amy Records label, adapted from humorist Dan Greenburg's 1964 book of the same name; the album reached No. 131 on the Billboard Top LPs during a twelve-week chart run.

Berg died of heart failure on September 14, 1966, at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan at the age of 66. She is buried at Clovesville Cemetery in Fleischmanns, New York. A biography by Glenn D. Smith, Jr., Something on My Own: Gertrude Berg and American Broadcasting, 1929–1956, was published by Syracuse University Press in 2007, and Aviva Kempner's documentary Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg examined her career in 2009.