His low-key, literate drollery and softly tart way of tweaking trends and pretenses made him one of the most sought-after writers in radio and television from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Latvian Jewish immigrants Harry Aiskowitz, who worked as a haberdasher, and Anna Katzen,[4] Ace grew up wanting to write, and as the editor of his high school newspaper, he took on his first nom de plume, Asa Goodman.

Ace worked as a roller skating messenger for Montgomery Ward while he studied journalism at Kansas City Polytechnic Institute.

After working at the post office and a local haberdashery to support his mother and sisters after his father's death, he became a reporter and columnist for the Kansas City Journal-Post.

Jane wanted to attend the sold-out performance of Al Jolson in Kansas City; her boyfriends were unable to get tickets, but Ace had access to the concert via his press pass.

The editor, reasoning that since Ace's current assignment was covering local theater he would be the perfect man for the job, insisted he take it.

With an immediate need to fill fifteen minutes' more airtime and his wife having accompanied him to the station that night, Ace slipped into an impromptu chat about a bridge game the couple played the previous weekend and invited Jane to join the chat which soon enough included discussion of a local murder case in which a wife murdered her husband over an argument about bridge.

"), the couple's surprise improvisation provoked a response enthusiastic enough to convince KMBC to hand them a regular fifteen-minute slot, creating and performing a "domestic comedy" of their own.

The show settled into a new niche, a more universally based domestic comedy revolving around Jane's improbable situations and her impossible turns of phrase.

"[14] Written by Goodman Ace, who cast himself as a harried real estate salesman and the exasperated but loving husband of the scatterbrained, malaprop-prone Jane ("You've got to take the bitter with the better"; "Time wounds all heels"), Easy Aces became a long-running serial comedy (1930–1945) and a low-keyed legend of old-time radio for its literate, unobtrusive, conversational style and the malaprops of the female half of the team.

[22] Previously he and Jane had been part of a series of celebrity guests who filled in for Kaye while he entertained the armed forces troops who were overseas.

[31][32] The husband and wife team returned to network radio with the debut of NBC's Monitor; the Aces were announced as "Communicators" just after Dave Garroway's joining the show.

[33][34] They were also part of NBC Radio's Weekday, which was a Monday through Friday network offering aimed at women that premiered not long after Monitor.

[46] Ace did have a serious side, too, and he melded it to his sense of the absurd to create a radio show with the twist of taking listeners to re-created historical events described by actual CBS News reporters.

"[48][49][50] By this time, however, Ace began writing for other performers, including Milton Berle, Perry Como, Danny Kaye, Robert Q. Lewis, and Bob Newhart.

"[55] Perhaps his best turn of writing in these years, however, was his collaboration with Frank Wilson on The Big Show, considered NBC's last-gasp attempt to keep classic radio alive.

This 90-minute variety program was hosted by Tallulah Bankhead and featured a rotating cast that included some of America's and the world's greatest entertainers, including Fred Allen, Groucho Marx, Jimmy Durante, Joan Davis, Bob Hope, Louis Armstrong, George Jessel, Ethel Merman, José Ferrer, Ed Wynn, Lauritz Melchior, Ezio Pinza, Édith Piaf, Ginger Rogers, Ethel Barrymore, Phil Silvers, Benny Goodman, and Danny Thomas.

"[37] What he didn't necessarily feel good about, as he told radio interviewers Richard Lamparski and John Dunning two decades later, was the writers' non-mention in Bankhead's memoir recollection about The Big Show.

All became television writers and two eventually became successful playwrights: George Axelrod (The Seven Year Itch) and Neil Simon (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, The Goodbye Girl).

[69][70] Later, Ace shifted to more broad contemporary concerns and called the column "Top of My Head"; these essays became as well-read as his old radio show had been, without being either too frivolous or too overbearing.

[73] He also held a small regular slot offering witty commentaries on New York station WPAT for a time, before going out over the full National Public Radio network during the 1970s.

[74] However, though 130 episodes of this series were produced (all in 1970/71), and the show was re-run well into the 1980s on Canadian TV, The Trouble With Tracy was regarded as an almost unqualified disaster on a creative level.

[76] Her husband's tribute to her in the 8 February 1975 issue ("Jane") provoked hundreds of letters from his regular readers and from the couple's old radio fans.

He had the grace to celebrate her arrival with a handful of His confetti ..."Goodman Ace died eight years after his wife, in their New York City home in March 1982.

Ace offered his own epitaph when Saturday Review ran a poll asking well-known Americans to nominate members of a contemporary Hall of Fame.