Before television, the radio set was furniture, and a whole country sat down in front of it at the same hour. Comedians, detectives, marshals and Martians came out of one speaker, built from vaudeville timing, borrowed opera and sound effects made from kitchen tools. These stories cover the programs, the people, the hardware and a few famous nights that turned out not to be quite what everyone remembers.
Every tile in a Golden Age of Radio game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Shows
nine stories
1The serial that rearranged the whole evening
On the tile: Amos 'n' Andy1929
In the summer of 1929 a nightly serial about two friends newly arrived in Harlem went out over NBC's Blue network, and the country arranged itself around it. At the peak, in 1930 and 1931, more than 40 million people listened each night, and the sponsor pushed NBC to move the show from eleven o'clock to seven so eastern listeners would not have to wait up. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll voiced nearly every part themselves, two white performers playing Black characters, a practice criticized at the time and unacceptable now.
The gag was first heard in March 1940. Fibber McGee opens his hall closet and everything he owns comes down on him: golf clubs, roller skates, musical instruments, a pith helmet, a sword. The sound man built the avalanche by sending a torrent of props down a set of portable stairs, and it always ended the same way, with the small delayed tinkle of one little bell. The closet was opened more than two hundred times, and eventually the pause before it was enough to get the laugh.
Detroit station WXYZ needed a theme for a new western in 1933, and money was short. Someone found Rossini's William Tell Overture lying around the station, and the galloping finale was adopted in a hurry before the first broadcast, partly for its rhythm and mostly because it was firmly in the public domain. The Lone Ranger got an orchestra for nothing, and Rossini got an afterlife. Today far more people know those bars as a masked man's entrance than as part of an opera from 1829.
Having made a hit of The Lone Ranger, producer George Trendle wanted a modern hero at the same Detroit station, and told writer Fran Striker to make him a relative of the masked man. The Green Hornet went on the air in 1936 as a newspaper publisher who fought crime at night. The Ranger galloped in to Rossini. The Hornet arrived to Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee. One studio in Michigan supplied two masked heroes and two borrowed pieces of classical music.
The voice that asked who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men started out as hired help. When the character first reached radio in 1930 he was only the narrator of CBS's Detective Story Hour, introducing other people's mysteries. By 1932 he had a program of his own, and soon he stopped announcing the hero and became one. Frank Readick played him until the show left the air in 1935. When it returned in 1937 the part went to a twenty-two-year-old named Orson Welles.
Lucille Fletcher's script gave Agnes Moorehead a bedridden woman, a telephone and a murder plot she slowly realizes is her own. Suspense broadcast it live twice on May 25, 1943, once for the East and again for the West, and brought it back again and again over the next seventeen years. Moorehead used the same copy of the script every time, and spent hours before each broadcast working herself up into the panic of Mrs. Stevenson. She appeared in more episodes of Suspense than any other actor.
WSM in Nashville had been running a barn dance since November 1925, when announcer George D. Hay put a seventy-seven-year-old fiddler named Uncle Jimmy Thompson on the air. In December 1927 the program followed an NBC hour of classical music, and Hay told listeners that for the past hour they had been hearing music taken largely from the grand opera, but that from now on they would present the Grand Ole Opry. The new name stuck, and it is still in use.
Gunsmoke reached CBS radio in 1952 as the vanguard of what the business called the adult western: Dodge City in 1873, a marshal who could not always square the law with his own feelings, and violence nobody tidied up. William Conrad played Matt Dillon and kept the role until 1961. Television took the show in 1955 and ran it until 1975, the longest western in prime time, while the radio marshal went on patrolling a town that listeners never saw for six more years.
Jack Webb played a police lab technician in a 1948 movie and came away agreeing with its technical adviser, a Los Angeles sergeant, that plain investigative procedure was dramatic enough on its own. In 1949 he won the department's cooperation on two conditions: keep the files confidential and never put the police in an unflattering spot. In return he was handed real cases. Dragnet ran on radio from 1949 to 1957, moving at the pace of actual detective work, and its deadpan delivery made routine sound cool.
Benny had spent sixteen years building a character too cheap to part with a dime. On March 28, 1948, walking home at night, he is stopped by a robber demanding his money or his life. Then nothing. Dead air was the one thing commercial radio feared, and the silence stretched while the studio audience worked out what it meant and started to laugh. The robber repeats himself. More silence. Finally Benny snaps, "I'm thinking it over," and the room comes apart.
Mel Blanc gave Bugs Bunny his voice, and he also gave Jack Benny's ancient Maxwell automobile its sputtering and wheezing. On radio a broken-down car could not be shown, only heard, so a jalopy refusing to start became a performance delivered by a man standing at a microphone. Blanc did the same trick as Benny's hopeless violin teacher and as Polly the parrot, and spent more than fifty years in show business persuading audiences that he was something other than a person.
A ventriloquist's act depends on an audience watching his lips fail to move, which makes radio the least promising place on earth for one. Newspaper radio pages wondered why Rudy Vallee would waste airtime on Edgar Bergen and his wooden partner, Charlie McCarthy, when he gave them a guest spot in December 1936. They stayed thirteen weeks, and by May 1937 Bergen was hosting his own hour on NBC. For 1937 the Academy voted him an honorary Oscar for his comedy creation. The statuette was carved out of wood, and its mouth opened and closed.
Gertrude Berg was a housewife and amateur writer when she created the Goldberg family for radio in 1929, and then did nearly everything else as well, writing the scripts and playing Molly. She went down to the Lower East Side to listen to how people really talked. When a scene took place at breakfast she insisted on breaking real eggs into a real frying pan while the cast rattled silverware. In 1951, more than twenty years into the part, she won the first Emmy given to a lead actress.
Ora Nichols ran the sound effects department at CBS, the only woman to run one in radio's golden age, and she led the team that gave The War of the Worlds its noises. Her principle was that the real object usually sounds wrong. An egg beater, she pointed out, makes a more convincing lawn mower than a lawn mower does. For radio's first science fiction series she built rocket jets out of a modified air conditioner and opened an alien hatch by turning a cast iron lid.
American networks allowed nothing but live broadcasts, and when Bing Crosby refused to keep performing his show live, NBC sued him. A Signal Corps major named Jack Mullin, touring German radio stations at the end of the war, was tipped off near Frankfurt about a machine that recorded on tape, and brought two of them home in January 1946. Crosby heard what tape could do, had Mullin record the opening show of his 1947 season, and sent fifty thousand dollars to the small California company building an American version. After that, radio could be edited.
Irving Berlin wrote it in 1918 for an army camp show, cut it before the performance and put it away. Two decades later Kate Smith's manager asked him for something to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Armistice, and Berlin dug the song out, trimming a phrase that had come to sound partisan: to the right became through the night. Smith sang God Bless America on her CBS program on November 11, 1938, and the country has never quite put it down since.
CBS did not hire Edward R. Murrow as a reporter. His title was director of talks, and the job was persuading notable people to come to a microphone. His own first news broadcast, on Christmas Eve 1936, was read from a script another man had written for him. Four years later he was standing on a London rooftop during the Blitz, describing searchlights and antiaircraft bursts over a blacked-out city, having already told Americans what it meant that London's children had all been sent away.
Before she wrote about pesticides, Rachel Carson wrote radio scripts about fish. The federal Bureau of Fisheries wanted short programs on marine life, a series called Romance Under the Waters, and Carson, unable to find a teaching job, took the part-time assignment and made the ocean interesting to people who had never given it a thought. When a permanent post opened in 1936 she was hired as a junior aquatic biologist, one of only two women at the bureau in a professional job.
The cheapest way into radio in the 1920s had no batteries and nothing to plug in. A wire antenna, a coil, a small crystal and a fine metal point were enough, because the energy in the radio wave itself could work a pair of earphones. The trick is the crystal: a metal whisker resting on it passes current more easily one way than the other, which is what turns a radio wave into sound. Vacuum tubes took over by the mid-1920s, since they could amplify as well as detect.
Edwin Armstrong worked out the superheterodyne in 1918, as an Army Signal Corps captain serving in France. Rather than amplify a faint incoming signal directly, the circuit mixes it with one the receiver generates itself and does the hard work at a single fixed frequency. That is why a tuning knob can cross an entire band without losing sensitivity. RCA began selling superheterodyne sets in 1924, and it is still the standard circuit for radio reception. The Inventors Hall of Fame says every radio or television set uses one or more of Armstrong's developments.
Armstrong's crowning invention was wide-band frequency modulation, patented in 1933, which pushed the hiss and crackle of a thunderstorm out of broadcasting. RCA's engineers were impressed. Its salesmen and lawyers were not, because David Sarnoff had decided to push television, and a better radio system threatened a network built on AM stations. In the hard years of the 1930s there was little public clamor for better sound either. After Sarnoff barred him from the Empire State Building tower, Armstrong built his own in New Jersey and spent much of his life in court.
Galvin Manufacturing in Chicago built a car radio an ordinary driver could afford in 1930 and needed a name for it. Motor, plus the ola ending that Victrola had made fashionable, gave them Motorola, meaning sound in motion. To sell it, Paul Galvin drove his Studebaker about 850 miles to a manufacturers' convention in Atlantic City, parked at the entrance to the pier and played the radio through loudspeakers at everyone walking in. He went home with enough orders to keep the company alive.
For five years one American station broadcast at 500,000 watts, ten times the legal ceiling then and now. WLW in Cincinnati switched on in May 1934 and reached most of the country after dark. It also reached places nobody wanted it. Engineers rewired nearby houses where the lights would not switch off, gutters worked loose from buildings, a hotel's neon sign never went dark, and farmers said they picked up the station through their barbed wire fences. Regulators ended the experiment in 1939.
Look at a radio dial made in the 1950s and there are two little triangles, at 640 and 1240. They are civil defense marks. Under a plan begun in 1951, commercial stations would abandon their own frequencies in an attack and broadcast instead on those two, so that Soviet bombers could not use a city's radio stations as navigation beacons. Sets sold after 1953 had to carry the marks. The system was retired in 1963, leaving the triangles as a puzzle for collectors.
Bell Labs gave Karl Jansky a dull assignment: find out what was interfering with shortwave radio calls across the Atlantic. He built a big rotating antenna his colleagues nicknamed the merry-go-round, and at a wavelength of 14.6 meters he kept hearing a faint hiss. It peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, which is not a solar day but a sidereal one, the rhythm of the stars rather than the sun. The source was not on Earth. He had picked up the center of the galaxy.
Turn on an AM radio late at night and stations arrive from hundreds of miles away. The reason is a layer of the ionosphere called the D layer, which forms in daylight and absorbs AM signals before they get far. After sunset it disappears, and the same signals bounce off a higher layer and come back down a long way from home. That is also why many stations cut power or sign off at sundown: after dark there is suddenly room for everyone to interfere with everyone.
American stations west of the Mississippi River are assigned call signs beginning with K, and stations east of it get W. A handful of old three-letter holdouts sit on the wrong side of the line and were allowed to keep the names they already had. Early stations also picked letters that stood for something. WGN belonged to the Chicago Tribune, the World's Greatest Newspaper, and WLS to Sears, Roebuck, the World's Largest Store. Listeners were expected to remember the slogan along with the spot on the dial.
Frank Conrad, a Westinghouse engineer, had been playing phonograph records from his garage workshop in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, and fielding so many requests that he announced a regular schedule. A Pittsburgh department store noticed and ran newspaper ads for sets that could pick him up. Westinghouse saw the shape of a business, and on October 27, 1920 the Commerce Department licensed its new station as KDKA. Six days later KDKA read out presidential election returns, telephoned over from the Pittsburgh Post, to whoever had a set.
David Sarnoff, who would go on to run RCA, told a story about the night the Titanic sank. In his telling he sat alone at a wireless set on top of a New York department store and stayed three days taking down the names of survivors, which made him the hero of radio's most famous night. Contemporary press accounts describe something else. He reached the station after word of the disaster had already come in from Cape Race, and two other operators worked alongside him.
AT&T owned a New York station and had a theory: sell blocks of air time the way you sell a long-distance call. On August 28, 1922 the Queensboro Corporation bought ten minutes on WEAF and used them to talk up apartments in Jackson Heights, Queens. The bill came to fifty dollars. That is generally counted as the first commercial on American radio, and it settled the question of who was going to pay for all of this. No recording of it survives.
The story goes that on Christmas Eve 1906, from his laboratory at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, Reginald Fessenden sent out music and speech, and ships' wireless operators heard voices where dots and dashes belonged. It is the founding scene of broadcasting. The trouble is the evidence. No newspaper or magazine of the period mentions it, and the account rests on a letter Fessenden wrote in 1932, near the end of his life. What is documented, with witnesses and reports, is a demonstration on December 21, 1906.
Herbert Morrison's account of the Hindenburg burning is remembered as live radio. It was not on the air that evening at all. He and engineer Charlie Nehlsen had come from Chicago's WLS to record a routine piece about an airship landing, cutting grooves into a disc on a machine that could record but could not play back. A shock wave from the blast knocked the stylus off the disc, and Nehlsen put it back. The recording reached the country the next day, on NBC.
On the night before Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles, then twenty-three, put Martians in New Jersey, and the country is supposed to have run screaming into the street. The ratings tell another story. A survey of five thousand households that evening found about two percent listening to anything resembling a radio play on CBS. Some listeners did tune in late and call the police, and newspapers, no friends of radio, turned those calls into a national hysteria that researchers have never been able to find.
7Sixty million Americans heard it end in two minutes
On the tile: Louis fight1938
The rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling on June 22, 1938 carried more than a title, since Germany had made Schmeling a symbol, and the broadcast went out in English, German, Spanish and Portuguese. About 60 million Americans listened, close to half the country, with a worldwide audience put at 100 million. Clem McCarthy called it for NBC in the rapid patter he used for horse races, and was nearly done before he started. Louis won at two minutes and four seconds of the first round.
Radio networks would not air recordings, calling them deceptive to listeners. George Hicks broke the rule on June 6, 1944, from a signal tower aboard the USS Ancon, the chief communications ship off the Omaha beachhead, speaking into a seventy-five-pound Recordgraph the Navy had lent the press pool. Other reporters reached the air sooner, describing what they had seen. Hicks stood back and let the sound of the invasion do the work, and all four American networks carried his recording that night.
Franklin Roosevelt is remembered talking to the country by the fire every week. He did not. Depending on how you count, there were between 27 and 31 fireside chats in eleven years, the first on March 12, 1933 about the banking crisis and the last in June 1944. He did not name them either. A broadcast executive called the second one a fireside chat and the phrase stuck. What made them work was pace: Roosevelt spoke about 120 to 130 words a minute where politicians ran to 175 or more.