personal articles to an insistent debt collector. Allen followed this with two shorts for Vitaphone, also filmed in New York. Allen's first feature film was the 1935 Dick Powell musical comedy Thanks a Million, which The New York Times reviewed, naming only Allen in their headline. 1940's Love Thy Neighbor played off the comic feud with Jack Benny. His sole leading role was as flea circus impresario Fred F. Trumble Floogle, in the frenetic It's in the Bag!, a loose adaptation of Ilf and Petrov's novel The Twelve Chairs. Return to radio In 1945 The Fred Allen Show returned to NBC, Sunday nights at 8:30 p.m. EST. Standard Brands' Blue Bonnet Margarine and Tender Leaf Tea, and later, Ford Motor Company, were the sponsors for the rest of the show's run. (Texaco revived Texaco Star Theater in 1948 on radio, and more successfully on television, making an American icon out of star Milton Berle). Allen again made a few changes, including the singing DeMarco Sisters, to whom he'd been tipped by arranger-composer Gordon Jenkins. "We did four years with Mr. Allen and got one thousand dollars a week," Gloria DeMarco remembered. "Sunday night was the best night on radio." Sunday night with Fred Allen seemed incomplete on any night listeners didn't hear the DeMarco Sisters, whose breezy, harmonious style became as familiar as their cheerfully sung "Mr. Al-len, Mr. Alll-llennnn" in the show's opening theme. During the theme's brief pause, Allen would say something like, "It isn't the mayor of Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga, kiddies." That device became a signature for three of the four years. Allen's Alley The other change, born in the Texaco days and evolving from his earlier news spoofs, proved his most enduring, premiering December 6, 1942. The inspiration for the mythical Main Street of "Allen's Alley" came from the small-town heartland folks who were often profiled in the newspaper columns written by O. O. McIntyre (1884–1938), one of the most popular columnists of the 1930s with some seven million readers. "Allen's Alley" followed a brief Allen monologue and comic segment with Portland Hoffa ("Misssss-ter Allll-llennnn!"), usually involving gags about her family which she instigated. Then a brief music interlude would symbolize the two making their way to the fictitious Alley. The segment was always launched by a quick exchange that began with Hoffa asking Allen what he would ask the Alley denizens that week. After