[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. We began on Monday with 100 Years of WNYC itself. Today, thing number two, 100 Years of Radio, radio as a medium. It felt as new and revolutionary to people in the early 20th century as television or the internet, or maybe now artificial intelligence have in the waves of communication technology since.

Suddenly, you didn't have to go to a theater or go to a town hall meeting or go to a stadium to be part of a live mass audience for news or entertainment. Imagine how new it must have felt when people all around the country in their own homes could hear the heavyweight championship boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney that took place in Chicago in 1927.

Male Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, main event 10 rounds for the heavyweight championship of the world. Introducing from Salt Lake City, Utah [unintelligible 00:01:35] weighing 187.5 lbs, former heavyweight team, Jack Dempsey.

[crowd cheering]

Brian: Well, I don't know if you needed to scream that loud. Radio is an intimate medium. We know that today. Spoiler alert, Tunney won. We've got more archival audio. We'll invite some oral history calls from you about listening to the radio or working in radio. We're happy to have as our guest, Matthew Barton, curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress. Matthew, thanks so much for this. Welcome to WNYC.

Matthew Barton: My pleasure, my pleasure.

Brian: To let people know you and your work a little bit, what is a curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress do?

Matthew: [laughs] Well, it's an enormous collection, and I certainly-- It was 3 million strong when I started in the job about 16 years ago, and it's closing in on 4 million, and those are recordings of all kinds. There are commercial recordings going back to Edison cylinders, and there are radio broadcasts going back to the '20s, very few from the '20s.

It really starts in the mid-'30s to have a serious amount of audio, but a great deal of radio does survive from then. Poetry, sound effects, the field recordings that the Library of Congress made of great American folk artists like Woody Guthrie and Muddy Waters, and the list goes on.

Brian: You've brought us a variety of things to listen to today, including that Dempsey-Tunney intro. To pin the moment in time of 100 years ago this week, July 1924, when WNYC first signed onto the air, what was the context for radio in the United States? How much was a radio an item likely to be found in American home in 1924?

Matthew: More and more likely. Usually, we date commercial radio broadcasting from November of 1924 when KDKA signed on. I mean, there's an earlier--

Brian: 1920, right?

Matthew: '20, sorry, not 1924. I've got the 100-year of marker in my mind. There was some broadcasting before that, but, you know, KDKA survived and thrived, and other people quickly followed suit. For a while, people were listening on crystal sets with headphones, but by 1924, the thing was to get an actual radio. I can't tell you what the actual penetration into homes was at that point, but it was significant and growing rapidly.

It was a strong economy, and this was a-- If you had a car, well, your next obvious purchase was a radio. Even if you didn't have a car, a radio was a really obvious purchase.

Brian: I think you just-- [crosstalk]

Matthew: It was entertaining, but it was also useful.

Brian: Yes. I think you just told me one thing I didn't know. When you talked about people listening on headphones at first, you mean the earliest radios didn't have speakers?

Matthew: Well, they did, but this was how you could build a radio at home essentially, and you listened on primitive headphones, and that's how a lot of people did it.

Brian: Got it.

Matthew: Actually, when KDKA first broadcast, no, there probably wasn't anything you could go into, but you had-- There was already a large amateur base for radio at this point. The so-called ham operators talking to each other via short wave. There were people out there to listen to it.

Brian: Before we move on and place some more clips that you brought, anything you want to say about that Dempsey-Tunney boxing match clip? Today, it's so commonplace that a sporting event would be on radio and TV and come into your home or into your car. Was something like that in the 1920s received as some kind of magic?

Matthew: I suppose it was. I don't know that that was the first broadcast of a boxing match. In fact, it couldn't have been, but you had-- The sporting events were on the radio. The big sports then were boxing, baseball, and horse racing. Sure there was definitely precedent for that. Although, while we still have sports on the radio, it's been a while since we've had boxing on the radio, and it was a staple in the '30s, '40s, and '50s, even into the '60s when you'd have closed circuit, a television broadcast where you go and pay to see a fight on a screen. There were simultaneous radio blow-by-blow broadcasts of those things.

Brian: By 1933, the relative newness of radio allowed the new president, Franklin Roosevelt, to rally the nation behind him in his so-called fireside chats during the Great Depression. Here's a few seconds of one.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: You people must have faith. You must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system, and it is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem, my friends, your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.

Brian: FDR from a fireside chat in 1933, and I have a reaction to some of the content of that that I'll get to in a minute, Matthew, but he wasn't the first president in the radio era. Did he somehow get it about being effective in the new medium more than his several predecessors?

Matthew: Perhaps he did, but Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover's predecessors, they were on the radio much less of their-- far fewer of their broadcasts survive because it was much harder to archive a radio program in those days. I believe Coolidge was thought, in spite of his reputation as silent Cal, Coolidge was thought to be an effective speaker over the airwaves. Hoover was a less popular president in a very difficult time, but what I've heard of him, he comes across well, but his message was perhaps wanting.

Brian: You know what struck me about that clip? FDR told the public there, that making the system work was "your problem, no less than it is mine." It's hard to imagine a politician saying that today, I think, as opposed to blaming someone else for not serving the public enough and blaming their own supporters. They're never to blame for anything in politics today. Do you hear it that way?

Matthew: [chuckles] Well, I don't know that FDR was blaming his own supporters as much as saying, "We're all in this together. I'm with you."

Brian: Yes, we're all in this together.

Matthew: That would've been my takeaway from that. I think one way in which he was very effective was he was on the radio a lot, not just the fireside chats, but the many speeches that he gave when he was touring the country, cutting ribbons, and opening dams and bridges, and such. He would use those as occasions for speeches, and they would often be more substantive than, "Gee, isn't this a marvelous bridge?" Or, "What a wonderful dam." Some of his most famous speeches were given in those settings, you know, like the I hate war speech.

Brian: Speech still in the 1930s, the other party was using radio too. You brought a clip of Wendell Willkie in 1938. He would become the Republican presidential nominee against FDR in 1940, and this is from a show called America's Town Meeting of the Air. First, here's a 30-second intro to that show from another episode.

Wendell Willkie: Friends and neighbors, we are meeting here tonight in the same spirit that prompted our ancestors more than 150 years ago to meet together in the town halls of America to discuss their common problems. Today, a marvelous new instrument has been placed in our hands, the radio. Through it, we are able to recapture one of our finest institutions, the town meetings. Once confined to purely local matters, it may by means of the radio become a national institution, a town meeting of the air.

Brian: Here's 30 seconds of Wendell Willkie in that series in 1938.

Male Speaker 2: Mister Wilkie, what accounts for the Canadian electric rates being so much less than the rate of the utility company on this side of the Niagara?

Wendell: I was just hoping somebody would ask me that question.

[laughter]

Wendell: The difference is that the American utility companies are now paying up to 20% of their gross revenues in taxes, while the public plants in Canada pay no taxes except a minor amount of tax on real estate.

Brian: Matthew, I guess it was a town hall with a live audience, because we heard an audience reaction there, right?

Matthew: Yes. Well, it was a town hall at New York's town hall. The broadcast typically originated there, though they would go on the road to different parts of the country and stage it at a venue in Florida or California, wherever. That show was on from 1935 until 1956.

Brian: In the intro we played, this is the mid-1930s already, but they're still describing radio in that clip as a marvelous new instrument. Was it still being experienced that way, at least in this context?

Matthew: Yes, it was about 15 years old at this point, but it's also the '30s are a great period of innovation in radio. The technology is improving alongside it, so you could do-- there were more and more remote broadcasts like that, and shortwave was playing a much more significant role that you could broadcast live from England or Europe to the United States or really from around the world.

The abdication crisis in England was covered in-depth live and made extensive use of shortwave. As Europe moved towards war, things like the Munich crisis, and the invasion of Poland, and so many other things, they had correspondence on the scene ready to make live broadcasts via shortwave.

Brian: We'll hear one of those in a minute. For listeners, if you're just joining us, this is episode two of our WNYC centennial series on The Brian Lehrer Show, A 100 Years of a 100 Things. We're in thing number two today, radio as a medium. Listeners, we invite you to contribute a piece of oral history as we talk about a 100 years of radio. What's your earliest memory for listeners of any age of listening to the radio, and how the radio affected you or role it played in your life at any time in your life? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692.

We plan to do oral history call-ins on probably all of the 100 segments that we'll do in this series. Name any radio show or moment from the past that you remember to this day. Let's say not from WNYC because Monday's segment was only about the station, so any other radio than WNYC for today. Anyone who has worked in radio, also invited to call in and reflect on the place of the medium in American life at any time based on your professional experience, or who has a parent or a grandparent, even, who talked about radio in the old days.

My mom as a little kid heard the Orson Welles War of the Worlds show that people thought was an actual invasion from outer space, although she tells me she didn't. Your oral history contributions, or ask any question about the history of radio, for our guest Matthew Barton, curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692, call or text.

The next clip you brought is of a news broadcast from Europe during World War II, but before we get to that, maybe we should acknowledge that Hitler used radio to great effect in his rise to power, glorifying the German people as he defined them, and painting them as victims of menacing others, especially Jews. We learned at that time that the power of radio to galvanize a mass audience could be used for evil as well as for good in the hands of effective propagandists, right? As one of the reasons there even was a Nazi empire.

Matthew: Yes, yes. I feel like Chuck Connors on the Rifleman telling his son, "The gun is a tool. It's as good or as bad as the man holding it," and I think that's a good way to put it. There's great radio, and there's not so great radio. I think it's important to say that these things did not go unanswered at the time. Hitler might make a speech, and these portions of those were often heard in translation by a shortwave.

But the radio networks, NBC and CBS both, had foreign divisions making shortwave broadcasts in other languages. When Roosevelt or another major figure gave a speech, they were typically on the air often simultaneously, providing a translation. There was a Spanish announcer, Buck Canel, who was for the Spanish-speaking audience in Central South America, Caribbean. He was the voice of Roosevelt.

Brian: Somebody just wrote to me that her father, who has since passed years ago, told her that he heard Hitler on the radio as a kid when he was growing up in British Mandate Palestine. That's how far and wide, according to this one listener, Hitler's voice spread at that time. Here's a clip of a news broadcast from London that you brought from the Library of Congress archive, a radio broadcast during the bombing of London in 1940, before the United States even entered the war.

John Steele: The night raids have been pure frightfulness. Streets of little houses inhabited by working people have been wrecked, and their belonging smashed. It's here that their lives have been lost and wounds inflicted. Hospitals have been hit three or four times. Bombs have been storming indiscriminately north, south, east, and west, over the center of the city and in the suburb. Lots of plants have been smashed with high explosives, and fires have been started with incendiary bombs.

Brian: The newscaster there was named John Steele in 1940. Matthew, any reason you chose that particular clip as your World War II example?

Matthew: Well, there are clips of Edward R. Murrow, very, very justly famous ones, and Murrow is still well remembered. That was the voice of a man named John Steele who is not well remembered. That's really just, I don't know, the mist of time. John Steele was the chief of the Mutual network, their London bureau. I think it's interesting for a few reasons. One, he was a much older man than Murrow. He was born in 1870.

His background, for most of his life, he was a print journalist. He was born in Belfast and emigrated but became chief of the Chicago Tribune's bureau in London and lived there. He's broadcasting as an American with but with someone with very, very deep ties to that time and place. It's the voice of someone who has lived through World War I and now is living through the early days of World War II.

It's just a reminder just how much radio does survive from that time. It's not all accessible and available. We can serve it at the Library of Congress on site. There's still valid issues with rights holders and so on. We can't just put everything online. That clip is an exception. Just a reminder of the-- Murrow would talk about what it was like to witness a bombing. Steel is talking about the aftermath, and he was there for it. He broadcast daily for Mutual, was actually wounded and arrayed and was back on the air a couple of days later.

Brian: Let's take our first oral history caller. I think Eileen in Flatbush is going to tell us a story about radio, like everything else in its early days as a commodity reflecting a divide between the haves and the have-nots. Eileen, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in.

Eileen: Hey, good morning, Brian. First time, long time. I'm calling to share I think how relatively rare access to radio was in many poor and working-class neighborhoods in the city. I know this because I've looked into my family's immigration records in New York and the census records, and they originally settled in Fort Greene from Ireland.

I have the census records for the block of the Delphi Street between Park Avenue and Myrtle Avenue in both 1918 and in 1928. In those days, the census was taken in person, and there are many more detailed questions that are asked of you than there are now. One of the questions is, do you have a wireless? Now on that block, there was only one family with a wireless, and it was my family.

I thought to myself, what would it have been like to have the only radio, which is like akin to having the only telephone or a TV or computer in the village? It really helped me learn why my family is the way it is because, in many ways, we're still information central, where we're sharing news or people are looking towards for news.

Brian: Some of the roots of that are that your family back then had the only radio on the block.

Eileen: 100%. My brother, older brother, Kev Riley, went into radio, long time radioman starting at Hofstra and then wound up that the NPR affiliate in Nashville, among other things. Yes. There you have it. I'm wondering if your guess in terms of the history, it would be easy to figure out who had radios and who didn't because it was part of the census record.

Brian: Really interesting. I don't know if that falls within your portfolio as curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress. Anything on that?

Matthew: I wish I could tell you. I'll put my staff right on it. It's a fascinating question. There are some statistics I've seen of how many people-- they're very broad, so it'll say, okay, on this date, 47% of the country had a radio. I don't know that it gets down to the nitty-gritty of do you have access to one. Does a neighbor have one? How often do you hear it? There are some interesting articles I've read from the time looking at what immigrants were listening to.

There was a study done around 1940 of Italian immigrants in Boston. It is somewhat like you describe that there would be one family on the block or maybe one family in the building that had a radio. At certain times, people would all congregate there because you did have-- local radio stations would have the Italian Hour or the Swedish Hour. You'd have a program for that community. That's a really interesting question, I think.

Brian: Eileen, thank you. Thank you so much. Great call. Later, the same thing would happen with television, when there were early adopters, people who could afford it or were just interested, and then people would gather in their living rooms for big news events or sporting events or whatever. Another oral history caller is Margo in Manhattan. Margo, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Margo: Hi. Good morning. How are you?

Brian: Good.

Margo: This has been really fun for me because it flashes back. I just wanted to hit a couple of quick points about the persistence of radio and why it's probably not going to go anywhere. In the mid-'90s I was the news director in Morning Drive, co-host in Columbus, Indiana, where Mike Pence got his start of when he was starting a station called WRZQ, if I can plug them. In a lot of the ways, the smaller towns are still like the old tiny radio.

I was considered emergency personnel since there was no local TV station. If I got snowed in, the sheriff sent a deputy, and he got me to work. I had the advantage of bringing topics to a community with literally no exposure, whether by choice or just by happenstance. I interviewed Candace Gingrich, did stories on AIDS and domestic abuse.

The final point I want to make is that, in radio, it's such a special medium because the words have to be so perfectly descriptive, especially with something that's almost exclusively visual without the visual aid. For example, when the Olympic flame came through Columbus, not only did I have to paint the picture with the words and communicate the action, but you also try and get forth that sense of pride and excitement and anticipation as it was coming through town while describing it.

Being a part of this history of radio and being such an important part of a community whether they agree or disagree maybe with some of the more editorial things I did, they relied on me and on us on the radio stations for the local information and just to maintain their sense of community and self. I think it's a beautiful thing, and I hope you guys go on for another 500 years.

Brian: Margo, thank you very much. We're going to take a break here, then we'll continue with Matthew Barton from the Library of Congress and more of the radio history clips that he brought. It's 100 Years of 100 Things. Thing number two, the history of radio over the last century. Stay with us.

[music]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. With our WNYC centennial series for this show, 100 Years of 100 Things. We're going to be doing these on Mondays and Wednesdays for basically the next year. Next week, it's going to be two things about the history of Republican presidential candidates during the Republican Convention next week. Today, we are in thing number two, the history of Radio with Matthew Barton, curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress who's brought us some wonderful radio history clips.

You brought a 15-second example of a music show, and why are we now bringing on a music show because, shortly after World War II, television took over as the dominant mass medium for news and entertainment, and radio had to adapt. Here's a 15-second clip from the old WNEW AM program in New York, a classic show of theirs called Make Believe Ballroom. We'll play it and talk about it from the intro to the show.

[MUSIC - Glenn Miller: Make Believe Ballroom Time]

It's Make-Believe Ballroom Time,

Put all your cares away

All the bands are here to bring a cheer your way

Brian: Talk about the context of that or maybe even more broadly, would you say that the advent of television, forced radio stations, and radio network owners to create what are still the dominant formats in radio today like all music or all news and talk?

Matthew: Yes, I think that's fair speaking very broadly. You certainly had news on the radio before that, and you had music live and recorded on the radio before that. Make Believe Ballroom was a program of recorded music, but it was presented a broadcast. This was something that really precipitated a great dispute with the musicians union actually because there was a lot of live music on the radio too, and the head of the musicians Union felt that every time you play a record on the air and a musician is not paid for it, well, you're getting away with it. That led to a couple of strikes in the 1940s.

Though the second of those was settled at the end of 1948, and that's then television starts to assert its importance. That's a good time to be a disc jockey, basically. Many of them become major stars in their own right.

Brian: Our next clip is of a disc jockey, the New York DJ Rosko. Some of our listeners may remember him as one of the original progressive rock FM album DJs from WNEW FM in the late '60s. The clip you have of Rosko is from the early '60s, 1963 in a different context. Do you want to set this up?

Matthew: He was actually in Oakland. He was in Oakland at that point, not New York. He was enough of a star, at least in California, that he got to cut a record album of his own, and essentially, he recreated his show on an LP. He does these bits of poetry that involve current events, but he's also talking over the beginning of songs and the ends of songs and acting like he knows the singer and things like that.

Brian: Here's a few seconds of Rosko, and you'll hear a reference here to Eliot Ness.

Rosko: [unintelligible 00:30:36], gee, what a guy. Hey, Eliot Ness, I stopped by that mess. I walk around talking about that you're the best played cool dad yo, or you ought to know, the best in any land is Rosko.

Brian: Huh. He wound up doing a little promotion for himself there. Was that like an intro to a show or something like that as he mentioned a few other stars of that era?

Matthew: Yes, he would do things like that between records. On that same album, there's another one where he references Khrushchev and Castro, things like that. It's very much of the moment, and often it's about himself. Don't forget who's bringing all of this to you. It's Rosko.

Brian: Susan in Huntington is calling with a little oral history. Susan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Susan 1: Yes, hi.

Brian: Hi.

Susan 1: Hi.

Matthew: Hi.

Susan 1: My parents moved to Long Island in 1954. I have such vivid memories of waking up in the morning, of course, when it was not a school day. My mother always had the radio on, always in the morning, and listen to shows like Make Believe Ballroom. I think actually that came on later on in the day. To this day, that's why I remember so many songs from the '40s and '50s that were played on that radio. She's listened to Arthur Godfrey. That was probably an early talent show.

Brian: Right, you know, like a variety show.

Susan 1: Yes. Variety Show. Then progressing into the '60s, of course, as I was getting older, transistor radios, everybody walked around with a transistor radio. At night, you go to bed and you put your radio on. You listen to all the radio stations that played, all your favorite rock music back then, but I do have a vivid memory of being--

After 9/11, I always had a radio on in my office, even though I was working. I always had radio on in the background. Then I remember listening on, I know it was WNEW at the time, interviews with people who had experienced 9/11 and lost family members. Man, I was just glued to the radio then.

Brian: Susan, thank you. Thank you for those memories. You mentioned, Matthew, Rosko being popular as a DJ in Oakland, California. Susan is calling in from Oakland, California, with some oral history. Hi, Susan, you're on WNYC.

Susan 2: Hi, thanks. I live in Oakland. I was raised in Lincoln, Rhode Island. The story is about, in the 1940s, when I lived there, there was a local kids' quiz show held at the Lincoln dairy farms, and it was on the radio. That's how localized the stations were, or some of them anyway in those days. That's my story. I remember the question that I got, which is what is the gondola? That was it.

[chuckles]

Brian: Did you get it right?

Susan 2: I did.

Brian: Congratulations.

Matthew: Great.

Brian: Far from Venice, but she know what a gondola was. All right, we have one more clip that you brought us from your archives at the Library of Congress. We just heard Rosko in 1963. This is also from 1963, and you wrote a talk show sound bite in which the caller, not the host, not the guest, but the caller if I have this right, is Malcolm X. Here we go.

Matthew: Correct.

Bernice Bass: I only wondered about the preparation.

Malcolm X: As long as Martin Luther King is teaching them to turn the other cheek and love the two-legged dog as well as the four-legged dog, then naturally those time wouldn't be prepared. But the people who listen to King's philosophy in the South, a minute, a very small fraction of the people. The massive of our people don't believe in being aggressive, but they do believe in defending themselves when they're attacked.

Bernice: Wow, Reverend, I keep insisting on calling you Reverend.

Malcolm X: All good.

Bernice: Minister Malcolm X, we want to thank you for adding spice to the program tonight. I want you to know, as I'm talking to you, the phones are lit up right across the board.

Malcolm X: Well, I'm always listening to your program when I'm in the city.

Bernice: Well, thank you so much. It's been just a pleasure having you.

Brian: Malcolm X as a caller to Talk Radio in 1963. Do you want to tell us a little more about what that was?

Matthew: Yes, that was a program called News and Views. It was out of Newark, New Jersey. The other voice you heard was that of the host Bernie's Bass, and she was broadcasting from the late '50s into the early '80s, this program for the Black community. She was quite well known in New York and New Jersey. People like Malcolm X tuned in. She had many prominent guests from all fields, it wasn't strictly a political show.

There's one program where she has, as a guest in the studio, J. W. Alexander, who was Sam Cooke's manager at the time, and he's talking about what Sam Cooke was up to at that point. He also mentions that he was working with a very promising young man by the name of Lou Rawls who had a pretty good career of his own eventually. Yes, that's really a unique collection. So much of what survives of radio from that time is at the network level, and that's local.

Brian: Yes. Yes, yes.

Matthew: Obviously, it's significant for the obvious reasons, but it's so good to have, these local programs.

Brian: We have to leave it there because we are out of time for today. That's it for thing two in our new WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Thing number two has been 100 years of radio. Our next 100 Things segment will be next Monday, day one of the Republican Convention when we'll have thing three, 100 years of Republican presidential nominees. For today, we thank Matthew Barton, curator of recorded sound at the Library of Congress. This was great. Thank you so much for putting all the work in to get this ready for us.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.