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Due in large part to Marian Jordan's periodic health problems, Fibber McGee and Molly became a nightly 15-minute show in 1953, recorded without a studio audience in single sessions, the better to enable Marian Jordan to rest. The timing was sadly appropriate, as classic radio had entered its dying days. Still, the McGees remained a favorite presence on radio, even after the quarter-hour edition ended in 1956, appearing in short segments on the NBC radio show Monitor—under the rubric Just Molly and Me—from 1957 to 1959.
Radio historian Gerald S. Nachman has noted the Jordans were ready to renew with NBC for at least three more years when Marian's battle against cancer ended in her death in 1961. In the 1970s, Jim Jordan briefly returned to acting. An episode of NBC's Chico and the Man featured a surprise appearance by Jordan as a friendly neighborhood mechanic. Jordan also lent his voice to Disney's animated film The Rescuers (1977). He died in 1988—a year before Fibber McGee and Molly was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.
Jim Jordan married Gretchen Stewart after Marian's death. Gretchen and the Jordan children donated the manuscripts of Smackout and Fibber McGee and Molly to Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications after his death in 1988.
The show also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—right next to the building that once housed the NBC radio studios where the Jordans performed the show for so long. The S.C. Johnson Company preserved more than 700 recordings of the show it sponsored for 15 years.
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