Adventures in Old Time Radio

By Brian Rogers

Before there was television, before there were computers, before there was the Internet with its audio and video streaming, before there were cell phones, iPods, and iPads, there was radio.

Beginning in the early 1920s, electrical waves—mysterious to many—could be sent from senders or transmitters into boxes called radios in people’s homes. Sometimes the boxes weren’t boxes at all. In radio’s earliest days, hobbyists built radios (called crystal sets) with wire and empty oatmeal boxes or similar materials.

By 1930, radios were becoming massive pieces of wooden furniture proudly residing in living rooms.

At first, the waves carried talks and music from transmitters in cities into radios nearby. But, in 1926, dependable chains or networks of radio stations were being put together with telephone wires, and people in many cities could listen to the same programs simultaneously.

In the 1930s, local vocalists and other performers were being replaced on the air by network shows that informed, entertained, and enlightened. During the Great Depression, free entertainment coming over the radio helped ease evenings spent fretting over lack of employment and unpaid bills.

Programs such as Fibber McGee and Molly and Jack Benny brought laughter into millions of homes. Suspense and similar shows inspired terror, and Dragnet and Your FBI in Peace and War brought mystery. As World War II neared, and all through the conflict, radio instantly brought into homes everywhere news of major and minor events.

Because of radio’s immediacy, we learned, the same day, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, when Allied soldiers landed in France, and when surrender agreements were signed with Germany and Japan.

In his book, Brian Rogers, in a collection of articles based on material he has researched and written for various radio hobby publications, introduces some of the events and personalities that made up the golden age of radio, roughly from 1930 to 1960, and the decade preceding when radio was taking its first electronic baby steps.

He also shares his personal story with old-time radio and how, with warmly glowing vacuum tubes, his own hand-me-down radio brought friends to a boy who thought he had no friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669878339

Brian Rogers

Author Brian Rogers, who is old enough to remember some of the old-time radio years from 1920 to 1960, describes in this book some of the people and events that made the medium the “Theater of the Mind” it became. He also shares his personal story of how radio provided friends for a boy who thought he had no friends.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

On May 6, 1937, the German airship Hindenburg blew up in Lakehurst, New Jersey; and, as it fell in flames, electronic journalism took a giant leap.

Herbert Morrison, a 31-year-old radio reporter from station WLS in Chicago, had traveled to Lakehurst, along with engineer Charles Nehlsen, to record a description of the Zeppelin’s arrival from Frankfurt, Germany.

The ship had already made ten successful round trips, and its arrival was expected to be routine.

The reporter and the engineer were not to broadcast the arrival live but to send a recording back to Chicago to test the feasibility of transcribing an event for future broadcast. As well, they thought the sound of a blimp docking might be an interesting addition to their sound effects library.

But the mooring suddenly went terribly awry as flames leapt from the zeppelin’s tail section and licked their way quickly forward.

It’s burning, bursting into flames and is falling on the mooring mast and all the folks, Morrison screamed into his microphone. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. Oh, the humanity and all the passengers.

The National Broadcasting Company, the network with which WLS was affiliated, broke its rule against using prerecorded transcriptions on the air and later fed Morrison’s eye-witness reports to a fascinated nation.

That report, with the frenzy and emotion it portrayed, became a classic. I have a recording of it in my audio library. The terror conveyed still spans years and miles, and I feel it all over again whenever I hear it.

Morrison and WGN showed that radio, and later television and the internet, could credibly and effectively report an event simultaneously with its occurrence.

CHAPTER 2

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man who was our President during most of the Second World War, died suddenly April 12, 1945. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia.

The first President to effectively communicate using radio, he had become known for his fireside chats with the American people.

Our family learned of the President’s death from Florence, our neighbor girl, who ran from her house, tears streaming, to deliver the news as we returned from a shopping trip.

President Roosevelt died, she blurted between sobs. Victory in Europe would be less than a month away.

Most Americans learned of their President’s death through we interrupt this program radio bulletins. John Daly, who had broken the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, went on the air at the Columbia Broadcasting System, saying, we interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS News. A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead.

Less than two minutes earlier, International News Service teletype machines had clanged for attention and proclaimed FDR DEAD.

It had been 22 years since President Warren G. Harding had died in office in 1923, and there were no networks then. Radio news, if there was such a thing, meant an announcer grabbled a newspaper and read it on the air.

The earliest chain broadcasting wouldn’t take place for another two years.

In 1945, within two minutes of the 5:45 p.m. INS announcement, the sad message had been flashed to a nation.

The following day, the President’s body was returned to Washington by train. Arthur Godfrey, later one of CBS radio and television’s brightest stars, in 1945 had been a morning DJ on WJSV, the CBS affiliate in Washington. He was chosen to describe for the network the cortege as it wound slowly between Union Station and the White House.

What Godfrey said and the emotion his voice carried have become a hallmark recording in electronic journalism history.

Godfrey said, the drums are wrapped in black crepe and muffled, as you can hear. The pace of the musicians is so slow. Behind them, these are Navy boys. And just now, coming past the Treasury, I can see the horses drawing the caisson. …And behind it is the car bearing the man on whose shoulders now falls the terrific burdens and responsibilities that were handled so well by the man to whose body we are paying our last respects now. God bless him … President Truman.

His voice cracking with emotion, Godfrey then returned the broadcast to network headquarters.

CHAPTER 3

I’m fortunate my family didn’t get a TV until I was fifteen. By then I was hooked on radio and I’ve never been sorry. With my eyes closed the words coming through the Philco cathedral model next to my bed created mental images far larger and vivid, more clear and colorful, than those on the box with the picture tube in it.

My listening then revolved around play-by-play sports and kids’ adventure shows like Captain Midnight, Superman and Jack Armstrong.

My first sportscaster hero was named Edward Lloyd Tyson. He broadcast Detroit Tiger baseball games from 1927 until 1940, but I first remember him broadcasting University of Michigan football games in the 1940s.

He was known on the air as Ty.

He’d been born in Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania in 1888. As a youth, he pursued acting. A performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the nearby Pennsylvania town of Tyrone brought him in contact with bandleader Fred Waring who, shortly thereafter, in early 1921, brought his Pennsylvanians to Ann Arbor to play a J-Hop dance at the University of Michigan.

The band was a hit and received a request from Bill Holiday, radio station WWJ’s manager, to come to Detroit and play on the radio. Waring then learned that Holiday was looking for someone to help him with announcing tasks and he remembered Tyson, his friend from Pennsylvania.

Holiday wired Tyson and asked him to come to Detroit. Tyson’s reply? At once!

In those days of radio’s infancy, announcers performed in more than one area. Tyson’s chores at WWJ included broadcasts of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra; the openings of both the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel; presidential visits and the introduction to Detroit audiences of such notables as Charles Lindbergh, Fielding Yost, Helen Keller, Fannie Brice, Ty Cobb and Will Rogers.

On April 19, 1927, Tyson became Detroit’s first play-by-play baseball broadcaster when he broadcast a game from Navin Field (laterTiger Stadium). Detroit beat Cleveland that day, 8 to 5.

Tyson like other early baseball broadcasters, was skilled at reconstruction. When the Tigers were out of town, before direct lines and networks were commonplace, a telegraph operator in the opponent’s park would be Tyson’s eyes, tapping out a series of coded play-by-play messages. Another operator, in a WWJ studio, typed out these notes; and Tyson drew on his experience to fill in a complete play as though he was seeing it himself.

Three years earlier he had called the first broadcast of a University of Michigan football game from Ferry Field in Ann Arbor. Michigan Athletic Director Fielding H. Yost had given permission to broadcast the game against Wisconsin, which Michigan won 21-0, only because the game had been sold out.

Yost had been afraid broadcasting would hurt ticket sales; but, before the next game,, the Michigan Athletic Association was swamped with orders.

Yost happily agreed to more broadcasts.

Tyson’s last radio play-by-play baseball broadcast was in 1940, but he continued sports and other commentaries from WWJ microphones and performed administrative duties at the station.

When Tyson retired, Edwin K. Wheeler, then general manager of the WWJ stations, gave him a gold plated carbon mic of the type Tyson first used, which had to be tapped each time is was used to shake up the carbon so it would listen.

In 1951, he took over both radio and TV broadcasts of Tiger games during the final illness and following the death of his successor, Harry Heilmann.

On Father’s Day 1965, he took over Ernie Harwell’s mic for one inning of a Tiger broadcast. The move was such a success that Harwell, who often dropped by the Tyson home to drive his friend to appointments, called him back to the booth several times afterward. Tyson died at age 80, on December 12, 1968, from an arterial ailment.

CHAPTER 4

The idea of listeners in several cities listening to the same radio program at the same time was heady stuff in 1926.

But, on Monday, November 15, 1926, that’s just what happened. From the stage of the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) sent what it called its Inaugural Ball to 25 stations in the East and Midwest.

The stations were linked with New York by 3,600 miles of telephone