Juvenile action and adventure series
The first radio shows for children were heard only on local stations, such as Uncle Wip, which was on Philadelphia’s WIP in 1921. The best-known host of this kind of show was Uncle Don Carney, who became a radio institution with his show from New York’s WOR (a 50,000-watt station that could be heard in seven states). His ad-libbed program of conversation and nonsense songs began in 1928 and ran until 1949.
Network radio programs geared especially for young listeners began with The Adventures of Helen and Mary, which debuted over CBS in September 1929. In 1934 the series was given an overhauling and a new title, Let’s Pretend, under which it continued until 1954. A half-hour show broadcast on Saturdays, Let’s Pretend featured well-known fairy tales, dramatized by an all-juvenile cast.
Late-afternoon serial adventures for youngsters began with Little Orphan Annie, first broadcast over WGN radio in Chicago in 1930. Annie was first a comic strip, created in 1924 by Harold Gray for the Chicago Tribune, which owned WGN. The radio series graduated to NBC-Blue in April 1931. The show’s format set the standard for juvenile adventure serials, running for 15 minutes each weekday, with an open-ended story line that featured Annie vanquishing a procession of gangsters, spies, and pirates in a variety of far-flung locales. Annie’s longtime radio sponsor was Ovaltine, a malt-based milk flavouring, and the program thus inaugurated two other traditions: the long commercial and the premium that listeners could obtain by mail for a nominal fee and a remnant of the product’s packaging.
Comic strips such as Annie provided the basis for many long-running radio adventure serials. They had a preexisting base of fans, and radio show and newspaper strip helped promote each other. Dick Tracy, Superman, Terry and the Pirates, Jungle Jim, Don Winslow of the Navy, and Mandrake the Magician were among the comic characters who came to radio during the 1930s and ’40s.
Captain Midnight began in October 1939 as a regional series; it transferred to the Mutual network in September 1940 and remained on the air through December 1949. Midnight was actually Captain Red Albright, a former World War I flyer and commander of the flying Secret Squadron, who was dedicated to stopping the fiendish Ivan Shark, who wanted to take over the world. During World War II, the focus changed from rooting out Ivan Shark to defeating the Nazis and the Japanese.
One of the most popular daytime action adventure shows was Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, produced by the Hummerts and sponsored by Wheaties cereal. It made its debut on July 31, 1933. Jack was the star athlete and hero of Hudson High School; his adventures took him to exotic locales around the world.
A show that owed much to the juvenile serial drama format and that began as a weekday afternoon show although it soon moved to prime time, was I Love a Mystery, considered by many to be the ultimate radio action-adventure series. The brainchild of Carlton E. Morse, its heroes were Jack Packard, head of the A-1 Detective Agency, and his partners, Doc Long, a hard-fighting, hard-living Texan, and Reggie Yorke, whose seeming British reserve concealed an eagerness for a good brawl. Together they traveled the world and found blood-curdling terror, mysterious women, and hidden danger.
Sports
Sports coverage on radio began on April 11, 1921, when KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast the first live sporting event: a boxing match described by local newspaper reporter Florent Gibson. The first live baseball game was a Pittsburgh Pirates–Philadelphia Phillies game covered by announcer Harold Arlin and broadcast by KDKA on August 5, 1921. Football and tennis had been broadcast by 1922; by the fall of that year, football was regularly scheduled on New York’s WEAF. Graham McNamee, a cub announcer, was soon called upon by WEAF to broadcast several sporting events, including championship fights and the World Series starting in 1923. McNamee became NBC’s top sports announcer, presiding over football, baseball, and boxing. He infused his sportscasts with human interest and drama and became the first important play-by-play man.
Ted Husing became CBS’s answer to McNamee. He had a beautifully smooth voice, with a tone that he had achieved in part by intentionally having his nose broken and reset. Husing’s polar opposite in vocal quality was gravel-voiced Clem McCarthy, whose main interest was horse racing. McCarthy frequently covered the Kentucky Derby, memorably calling the victories of Seabiscuit and Whirlaway. McCarthy covered boxing as well, a highlight being his passionate description of Joe Louis’s victory over Max Schmeling in 1938. Also popular was Bill Stern, who from 1937 to 1956 had a 15-minute show that offered breathless and often fabricated accounts of amazing events in the lives of sports greats; Stern tried to cover himself by noting that the stories were “some real, some hearsay.”
Throughout the years, baseball and football games began to be transmitted regularly within their local markets by sportscasters, who became the official voices of their teams. Many of them developed highly personal styles with trademark phrases, such as Mel Allen’s “How about that!” after a Yankee hit a home run. Red Barber began calling Brooklyn Dodgers games for New York’s WHN in 1939, and his folksy but literate style was a revelation. Much of Barber’s style was carried on in television well into the 21st century by his onetime broadcasting partner, Vin Scully.
News
News was certainly a part of radio’s heyday; one of the first landmark broadcasts was on November 2, 1920, when KDKA in Pittsburgh signed on—from a makeshift studio in a garage—and an announcer read the returns of the presidential race between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox. The range of the 100-watt station was unknown at the time, and listeners to KDKA were asked to send in postcards if they were able to hear the broadcast. (A few thousand people may have tuned in.) By 1928 CBS and NBC were providing full live coverage direct from the Democratic and Republican conventions. When both networks presented live coverage of Herbert Hoover’s inauguration, they received a huge response from listeners.
Clearly, the public wanted more news on radio. Radio could broadcast news as it happened, which newspapers could not do. By the late 1920s the newspaper industry saw broadcasting as a distinct threat and imposed restrictions on radio stations that were using the same wire services that supplied the print media; stories were not to be broadcast until they had already appeared in newspapers. As a result, the national networks began building their own news-gathering services.
During the early 1930s, radio news coverage increased in quality and quantity. Key stories covered by radio included Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural speech on March 4, 1933; the kidnapping of the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and the subsequent trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann; and the crash of the Hindenburg.
As news became an integral part of each broadcast day, several commentators and newsmen became well known. H.V. Kaltenborn was one of the earliest radio commentators, making his radio series debut in 1922; he became known for his instant and lucid analyses of news events as they happened. His ability to translate several languages made him especially valuable as tensions rose in Europe in the 1930s. Lowell Thomas, a globe-trotting adventurer, brought his experience to radio in 1930 and continued delivering his daily 15-minute newscasts through May 1976. Thomas’s broadcasts were free of any personal bias; this could not be said of Walter Winchell, who breathlessly rattled off a combination of news and show-business gossip, much of it vitriolic, punctuated by the dots and dashes of a telegraph key.
American radio goes to war
Network radio news truly came of age during World War II. Edward R. Murrow had been hired by CBS in 1935 for a public relations job, and he was asked in 1937 to go to London to produce educational programs. Murrow hired reporter William L. Shirer to help him cover European news—and soon there was plenty of it. On March 12, 1938, Murrow (in Vienna) and Shirer (in London) covered Hitler’s annexation of Austria. Murrow went back to London and built a first-class team of reporters, including Howard K. Smith, Charles Collingwood, Larry Lesueur, and Eric Sevareid. They sent frequent broadcasts by shortwave from Berlin, Paris, and other European cities to New York. Murrow covered the effects of the Nazi bombing raids on the British capital; his opening line “This…is London,” became a well-known signature. By the coming of war to the United States on December 7, 1941, all the networks had increased the amount of air time devoted to news and had built impressive teams of correspondents worldwide.
American radio also expanded internationally during this period. There was no U.S. government international radio voice prior to the war. Lacking shortwave receivers, most Americans were unaware of the developing radio war. After American entry into the war, however, the government’s Office of War Information took control of the private shortwave operations and initiated the Voice of America (VOA) network, which began operating in early 1942 from a handful of transmitters, including some borrowed from the BBC. VOA sought from the start to provide a radio window into American news, public affairs, and culture.
The most star-studded programs in the history of radio also occurred during the war years, although they were never heard by most of the listening audience. These were programs produced by the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS), a wartime unit that broadcast on shortwave and sent recorded transcriptions of the shows to low-powered radio stations at outposts around the world. The AFRS also sent specially edited versions of popular network shows that had already been broadcast. Its homegrown product was written by top radio scribes and featured the greatest entertainers in the medium, all of them donating their services to the war effort. The main AFRS series were Command Performance and Mail Call, variety shows with a heavy emphasis on music and comedy that were virtually interchangeable. Among the most celebrated Command Performance shows was Dick Tracy in B-flat, a special hour-long musical spoof of the comic strip performed on February 5, 1945, and featuring Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, Jimmy Durante, the Andrews Sisters, Judy Garland, Jerry Colonna, Harry von Zell, Frank Morgan, and Cass Daley—a cast that would have broken the budget of any network variety series. Also important was Jubilee, which ran from 1942 to 1953 and was directed at African American soldiers. The show was hosted by comedian Ernest (“Bubbles”) Whitman and featured such entertainers as Lena Horne, Nat “King” Cole, and Count Basie.
The end of American radio’s Golden Age
Although experimental mechanical television broadcasts had begun in 1925, the economic effects of the Great Depression and the demands of World War II put the development of electronic television on hold, thus extending the era of radio’s dominance. When American network television finally made its first inroads in 1948, radio was in a vulnerable position. Many shows had been on the air for a decade or more. Much of what was on radio in 1948 seemed, if not stale, then very familiar. Television was soon offering exciting new stars such as comedians Milton Berle and Sid Caesar. Furthermore, after Bing Crosby began prerecording his Philco Radio Time show in October 1946, other programs followed suit; instead of being aired live, more and more programs were transcribed. As a result, prime-time radio soon lost much of its immediacy. When programs went out live, the listener knew that an announcer could make a “blooper” (say an unintended or forbidden word), an actor might miss a cue, a sound effect might not work—anything could happen. With the onset of transcribed shows, the listener knew that little unseemly would happen, because all the mistakes had been edited out. Thus, radio became less spontaneous and less exciting.
During the early 1950s many radio stars attempted the transition to television; some met with success, while others were resounding failures. Jack Benny and the team of Burns and Allen learned how to adapt to the visual medium, but Fred Allen found that television eliminated his ability to stimulate his audience’s imagination. After departing radio in 1953, Red Skelton showed his new television audiences that he was even more talented as a physical comedian than as a verbal one.
Some situation comedies, such as Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, became even bigger successes on television than they had been on radio, but others disappeared quickly. Some series were revamped for television: Gunsmoke became a long-running success on TV, but it had an entirely different cast from the radio version, and it lost much of its grit and tension in the transition. Dragnet fared better creatively; Jack Webb looked the part of detective Joe Friday, and he created a hard-bitten visual style as unique as the radio show’s aural one.
As audiences dwindled and sponsors disappeared, network radio shows had to operate on ever-decreasing budgets. Live orchestras were scrapped in favour of recorded music; fewer actors were used on a given program; and some shows went from a once-a-week, 30-minute format to a smaller-scale show, running each weekday for 15 minutes. Many of the big-time comedy shows, including the programs of Eddie Cantor, Rudy Vallee, and Amos ’n’ Andy, became little more than standard disc-jockey fare.
Although many long-established programs left the air in the early 1950s, radio still offered occasional excellent programs in the Golden Age tradition. Paul Harvey began his 15-minute reports in November 1950, and his distinctive delivery was still being heard regularly over ABC until his death in 2009, serving as one of the few 21st-century links to radio’s Golden Age. Other outstanding programs included the science-fiction anthology X Minus One (1955–58), the Stan Freberg comedy series of 1957, old dependables such as Gunsmoke and Suspense, and experimental fare such as CBS Radio Workshop, which ran from January 1956 through September 1957.
Daytime soap operas had been as tenacious as their heroines, but even they were jettisoned from radio when CBS canceled the last seven remaining shows in November 1960. The final remnants of radio’s Golden Age were the horror show Suspense and the crime drama Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, which aired their last broadcasts over CBS on September 30, 1962.
Randy Skretvedt