Show Boat. My Fair Lady. The Sound of Music. Some of the most iconic musicals of the 1940s and 1950s were orchestrated by a Kansas City native: Robert Russell Bennett.

The composer and conductor was lanky, ruddy, silvery-haired Robert Russell Bennett, back on the air in a WOR-Mutual program called Russell Bennett’s Notebook (7 p.m. E. S. T.).

Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) was lucky enough to have worked during that golden era of Broadway musicals when the credit "orchestrated by" implied an actual orchestra in the theatre.