Quinn was born in November 1900 in
Grand Rapids, Michigan. Not much is known about his early life nor is much known about his early career as a cartoonist. However, what little is known is that after discovering that, even though his drawings were thrown away by magazines, his captions were kept, Quinn found a job at
WENR in Chicago writing for some of the up-and-coming comedians there. It was there where Quinn met
Jim and
Marian Jordan in 1931. The Jordans at the time were veterans of Vaudeville and had previously worked at rival station WIBO. The pair already had starred in two programs on WENR,
Luke and Mirandy from 1927-1931 and
The Smith Family from 1929-1932. Quinn was hired to write scripts for
The Smith Family. That same year, the three of them created
Smackout which debuted March 2 on
WMAQ.
Smackout, a revised version of
Luke and Mirandy centered around Jim Jordan in the role of Luke Gray, a proprietor of a general store that was brimming with stock but yet "smack out" of everything, who loved to tell a good tall tale to his customers. The program was picked up by
NBC's
Blue Network for national syndication in 1933 and remained there until the summer of 1935. After the wife of a
Johnson Wax executive heard the program, the Jordans and Quinn moved to their more memorable radio series
Fibber McGee and Molly. Quinn was famous for delaying the actual writing of the scripts. Many from the show remember that he would wait until the last minute then lock himself in his office with a big plate of sandwiches, a huge pot of coffee, and two cartons of cigarettes. And hours later, he would emerge with a fresh script rarely in need of revision. From the start of the show, Quinn was full partner and by 1941, the Jordans and Quinn were splitting a $6000 paycheck three ways. In 1943,
Phil Leslie became Quinn's writing assistant on the show. Quinn left at the end of the 1949-50 radio season to pursue other projects. In 1945, Quinn created
The Beulah Show for
CBS Radio. The program spun off
Fibber McGee character Beulah Brown. Beulah was the McGee's maid on radio.
Beulah ran on CBS from 1945-1954 and had a television run on
ABC from 1950-1952. In 1950, Quinn created
The Halls of Ivy a lighthearted comedy about a professor, William Todhunter Hall, the president of Ivy, a small Midwestern College, and his wife, Victoria, a former British musical comedy star who sometimes felt the tug of her former profession, and followed their interactions with students, friends, and college trustees. The audition episode originally starred
Gale Gordon, (of
Our Miss Brooks fame), and
Edna Best as William and Victoria Hall. Gordon and Best were replaced by
Ronald Colman and
Benita Hume during the show's actual radio run; they had made a lasting impression with their numerous appearances on
The Jack Benny Program in the late 1940s. The program debuted on
NBC Radio in January 1950 and ran until May 1952. Quinn served as the sole writer on the program. The show also had a short television run during the
1954-55 television season on
CBS. The Colmans reprised their roles from the radio series, and Quinn also wrote for the
television series as well. The television show lost in the ratings, in part, due to its timeslot, Tuesday night at 8:30, against the last half of NBC's rotating trio of programs:
The Milton Berle Show,
The Bob Hope Show and
The Martha Raye Show. Quinn broke into television in 1953 as a story editor for the
Four Star Playhouse. He would write an episode of the series in 1956. In addition to these two episodes, Quinn also wrote several episodes of
Climax!,
The Dinah Shore Chevy Show,
The Addams Family and
Petticoat Junction. According to the
Internet Movie Database, Quinn also composed the theme song to the short-lived
Desilu-
CBS western series
Yancy Derringer. ==Personal life==