[3] Sponsored by General Electric, the 25-minute House Party originated from Columbia Square in Hollywood and premiered on CBS Radio on January 15, 1945.

It continued to be sponsored by General Electric even as it switched to ABC Radio, where it ran for 30 minutes in the same timeslot from January 3 to July 1, 1949.

A humorous monologue by Linkletter could be followed by an audience participation quiz to win prizes, musical groups, informal celebrity interviews and guest speakers from assorted walks of life.

One popular long running feature of the program was "Guess What's In The House", a game in which studio audience members would be given clues to the contents of a small model of a split level home placed on a center stage podium.

The show's best-remembered segment was "Kids Say the Darndest Things", in which Linkletter interviewed schoolchildren between the ages of five and ten.

[3] The popularity of the segment led to a TV series with the same title hosted by Bill Cosby on CBS from January 1998 to June 2000, and a revival since 2019.

The show's popularity led to the books Kids Say the Darndest Things (Prentice-Hall, 1957) with House Party mentioned in the front cover blurb.