The story arc of Andy's romance (and subsequent problems) with Harlem beautician Madame Queen entranced some 40 million listeners during 1930 and 1931, becoming a national phenomenon. Many of the program's plotlines in this period leaned far more to straight drama than comedy, including the near-death of Amos's fiancée Ruby from pneumonia in the spring of 1931 and Amos's brutal interrogation by police following the murder of cheap hoodlum Jack Dixon that December. Following official protests by the National Association of Chiefs of Police, Correll and Gosden were forced to abandon that storyline, turning the entire sequence into a bad dream, from which Amos gratefully awoke on Christmas Eve.