Davey Tree Surgery Radio Hour

 

The Davey Tree Surgery Radio Hour was broadcast every Sunday 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM on WEAF for a period of time around 1930. The program used the Skinner Organ Company studio at 677 Fifth Avenue in New York for the live production. And what a production it was: ensembles, solo organ, male quartets, instrumental trios, mixed quartets...  14 musical numbers, exit and intro themes and a short lecture; syndicated on NBC.

The founder, John Davey, evangelized horticulture and tree surgery. In addition to founding his eponymous Tree Surgery Institute, he sponsored this radio program, he filed patents, gave lectures, ran magazine ads, and published books, pamphlets, and articles. By 1929 Davey Tree was a 3-million dollar company. He argued that trees need physicians, not "butchers".  His book on that topic was literally titled The Tree Doctor, published in 1907. Those "butchers" he comically refereed to as "ignorant tree men" in his book.  It's actually a great read. 

His company still exists, now known as The Davey Tree Expert Company. It's been employee-owned since 1979 and has about 12,000 employees. The definitive biography of the company, Green Leaves, by Robert Pfleger was published in 1977.  But back to 1930. His  Davey Institute is also still with us. Founded in 1870, that 1930 program was part of it's "Golden Anniversary." But that radio program was not John Davey's doing. He died in 1923. He was succeeded by his son Martin Luther Davey Sr.  The book  Green Leaves attributed the radio program to his grand plans:

"The Davey Company was one of the early users of radio network time as a sales tool. In 1929 Martin [L. Davey] contracted for the "Davey Hour" to be broadcast from New York City every Sunday afternoon over a network of twenty-four stations stretching from Boston to Kansas City. The program consisted of old time popular music, none of the selections being less than ten years old. ...During the hour long program Martin would devote 10 to 15 minutes to discuss some phases of tree care."

The program was broadcast live with no prerecorded segments; all live. Martin had to make a trip a trip into New York City each Saturday night for the Sunday broadcast. According to the book Green Leaves, the program continued for 9 months through the Fall, and Winter of 1930 and into the Spring of 1931. But we know from a Program flyer the "Golden Anniversary" of the program was in June of 1930; airing on at least June 1st and 8th. That's not Autumn. So it may be that the program began around June of 1930. The program as discontinued before June of 1931 due to the impact of the Great Depression.  

CALLS	City	Time
WEEI	Boston, MA	5 - 6 PM EST
WGR	Buffalo, NY	5 - 6 PM EST
WEAF	New York, NY	5 - 6 PM EST
WFI	Philadelphia, PA	5 - 6 PM EST
WCAE	Pittsburgh, PA	5 - 6 PM EST
WCSH	Portland, ME	5 - 6 PM EST
WJAR	Providence, RI	5 - 6 PM EST
WGY	Schenectady, NY	5 - 6 PM EST
CKGW	Toronto, ON	5 - 6 PM EST
WTAG	Worcester, MA	4 - 5 PM EST
WFJC	Akron, OH	4 - 5 PM EST
WSAI	Cincinnati, OH	4 - 5 PM EST
WENR	Chicago, IL	4 - 5 PM CST
WOC	Davenport, IA	3 - 4 PM CST
WHO	Des Moines, IA	3 - 4 PM CST
WDAF	Kansas City, MO	3 - 4 PM CST
WOW	Omaha, NE	3 - 4 PM CST

Davey Tree actually came back to radio in September of 2025 with a 30 minute podcast called "Talking Trees". [LINK] It's been running about bi-weekly for 50 episodes at the time of this writing. 

Find That Radio Dial (Part 5)

 

This is an interesting Superhet table radio made by Silvertone. They were a Sears & Roebuck company, and are still based in Chicago today. It's a Silvertone model 4769 made in 1937. This particular model could tune both AM and two shortwave bands. The preset buttons are laid out in a ring, like an old phone with the tuner dial in the center. They called it a "Teledial."  [SOURCE]  I did fine a thread where someone tried to restore one. That quirky mechanism appears to be a challenge to disassemble and reassemble, with different pulleys turning clockwise and counterclockwise. [SOURCE] 

This dial has WEEI, WHDH, WORL, WCOP , WNAC, and WAAB; all metro-area Boston stations, so there's little mystery about location. This is set also closely matches an ad in the 1937 Radio Yearbook for the most popular Boston radio stations. (below) It lists WNAC, WEEI, WBZ, WAAB, WHDH, WMEX, WCOP, and WORL in that order. (Of course, that's a list of only local stations. )  But the omission of WMEX and WBZ from the pre-sets is at the least, interesting. Perhaps a reception issue, or just personal taste. These sets usually came from the dealer with some buttons already set for demonstration purposes. Then there were perforated tags the owner might add. This owner may not have bothered. This radio has 4 unlabeled.

Broadcasting Yearbook 1937

 WEEI is a well known Boston station, operating today on 850, but were on 830 kHz from 1929 to 1941, when this radio was new. However, the station today that broadcasts as WEEI broadcast as WHDH from 1929 until 1994; so this is a actually different button on that same dial. That WEEI, a Hubbard station and CBS affiliate, broadcast at 5,000 watts daytime, and 1,000 at night from 590 kHz.  590 in Boston today is WEZE; a religious talker. More here.

 WHDH broadcast from 850 kHz, and was owned by Matheson Radio Co. I know I wrote 830 above but 850 is what's in the Radio yearbook. It broadcast out of the Hotel Touraine from 1933 to at least 1939. The building was on the corner of Boylston St. and Tremont near the Boston Common. Built in 1897, the Jacobethan building even contained a library and in the 1950s, was the HQ of the local Communist party. It is still standing today but was converted to apartments in 1966. 

WORL broadcast from the Myles Standish Hotel. That building is also called Myles Standish Hall, and is located at 610 Beacon St. In 1949, Boston University bought the building and converted it into a dorms. They renovated again in 2018 and re-named it Wituwamat Memorial Hall. 

WCOP broadcast on 1120 from the Copley Plaza Hotel. The station changed calls from WMFH in 1935. Owned by the Massachusetts Broadcasting Corp on paper it was operated by it's founder, Joseph Kirby. He died in 11937 and it was sold by his estate to Arde Bulova. Under NARBA it moved to 1150 kHz in 1941. I think they began broadcasting the Hayloft Jamboree in 1948. Today this is WWDJ still on that frequency but broadcasting religious blather.

WNAC was a member of both NBC-Red and the Yankee network. Their studios were at 21 Brookline ave. But it shared a transmitter site with WAAB in Quincy, MA. A year later Congress began an investigation of "duopoly" stations and John Shepard had to divest. Seems quaint with the crazy monopolies allowed to run wild today. 

 WAAB was both a member of both the Mutual and Colonial networks. It broadcast on 1410 at 500 watts; another occupant of 21 Brookline Ave. It was the home of the Colonial network, which itself carried some Mutual programming. Owner John Shepard operated the Yankee network out of WNAC. Shepard had bought the station in 1931 and changed it's calls from WLEX. Mayflower Broadcasting made an attempt in 1938 to take WAAB from Shepard, but in 1941 he won in a re-hearing with the FCC.

But back to the Silvertone model 4769. It appears to have been popular in the 1930s, or maybe that's survivorship bias. Maybe they're just popular with collectors. A quick web search finds dozens of mostly non-working dust collectors.  

 

This one (above) has WJR, WLW, WKJR, KDKA, WWJ, WJAS, WWSW?, and WKBN? This is a mix of Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Detroit stations. This has to be someone in a rural area of Ohio, but that's hard to narrow down without a local station. 

WABC, WCAP, WBRB, WMCA, WIP, WEAB, WOR, WJZ, and KYW. This one is certainly in New Jersey, receiveing both New York and Philadelphia metro stations. WBRB, being the only local one of the bunch. 
 

 

 

DJ Sally Jessy Raphael

 

Sally Lowenthal was born February 25th, 1935 but if you recognize that face you would better know her as Sally Jessy Raphael. But her career started in radio and according to multiple publications she was fired from eighteen of the twenty four radio stations she worked at. The 2003 book Watching TV Talk Shows, cites merely 18 "jobs" so that claim is highly questionable. But without a doubt she had a huge radio career before her breakout in Television.  Her autobiography Sally: Unconventional Success lists a nine sets of call letters: WAVS, WFAS, KDKA, WINS, WIOD, WMCA, WOR, WPIX-TV, WPLG-TV and WRC-TV.  (Note: the index includes stations she never worked at. Ex. WOR, and KDKA.)

She's still alive as of this writing, 91 years old and she's only been retired since about 2014. You probably know her as a TV talk show host. For a stage name she combined her mother's maiden, Raphael and Jessy from her father's family. It was a name she used as early as the 1970s on air. 

During her teenage years she moved between San Juan, Puerto Rico and the New York suburbs. In Scarsdale, New York she worked at the local AM radio station, 1230 WFAS-AM in White Plains. The station had a program in which Junior High School kids read the news on the air and Raphael was one of the students selected to participate. She attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, but no record ties her to WRCT, though it did sign on in 1949... so it's possible. 

She also attended the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan and graduated from Columbia University in New York. Raphael studied acting under at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Her autobiography starts in her 20s with a radio show at an unnamed station in San Juan. A caption for a picture suggests the station was 630 WKYN-AM. Her mroning show may or may not have been simulcast on WQBS 99.9 San Juan or 760 WORA-AM. It's not clear how much network was in that network. One source reported that she she hosted a cooking show on WAPA-TV in Puerto Rico. If it's true it was her first foray into television.

Before TalkNet her radio career is hard to track. Print references are few. Her autobiography is a good source but it's not a resume, it's a hard knocks tale. The hard, dated references are hwo we put the time line together. She is quoted on the back of the 1983 book Making It In Radio as Sally Jessy Raphael with TalkNet. In 1977 she won a Lulu award for the Sally Jessy Raphael Show on WMCA in New York. [SOURCE] The OPC Bulletin of November 15th 1977 has a blurb about her WMCA career as she stressed that talk shows are journalism. [SOURCE]

 "Indeed it was the capacity crowd needed, for "the fastest mike in town." For 17 years an expert in moderating radio talk shows, Raphael is most currently with WMCA. She regaled a laughing, cheering audience from the moment she stood up throughout hour she had the floor.  "This is the first time I have addressed a live audience," she declared almost shyly.  To titters, she added, she wanted to show "Why I am the greatest telephone talk person in the country, and modest."

The OPC issue from October states that "She’s been in the business 17 years, with 17 different radio or TV stations." That may be the origin of the "fired 18 times" tall tale. It goes on to add that for three years at WMCA, she did an hour-and-a-half TV program in the morning, a noon program featuring classical music and a night-time rock radio show.  If the 17 year tenure is correct, she started at the station in 1960. For that to be true she'd have had to start in 1960. According to her autobiography she was hired by WMCA in 1976 and fired in 1981. 

Yet the OPC Bulletin adds details to her resume missing from even her autobiography. In Miami, she was a radio reporter with Storer Broadcasting Corporation.  That would have to be WGBS-AM, which Storer acquired in 1945 as WFTL and moved from Ft. Lauderdale.  She also hosted her own daily public affairs program on that Post-Newsweek TV station.  Post Newsweek owned 3 different stations at one point but I think this was WPLG. But the first station she cites in her Florida tenure was 1190 WAVS-AM in Davie, FL. She eventually worked her way up to WIOD-AM in Miami.

She got a News anchor job at Channel 11, WPIX-TV in 1976, but was fired 8 months later. That probably overlapped with her part time at WINS-AM in New York. In between WINS and WMCA she was offered a full time job at KDKA and turned it down to work at WMCA rather than relocate again. [SOURCE] But after WMCA is when she went big. 

WPIX Action news, 1976

Raphael  hosted a radio call-in advice show distributed by NBC Talknet which ran from 1981 to 1987, but was so popular it went into radio syndication in 1982. Prior to that it was broadcast our of WRC-TV in Washington D.C. One source reports it ran into 1987 overlapping her TV career. 

“In Touch with Sally Jessy Raphael” debuted as a local 30-minute weekday program on Oct. 17, 1983, airing after “Donahue.” It was shot at KSDK’s studio. The Sally Jessy Raphael Show (later shortened to Sally), which ran in first-run syndication from October 17, 1983, to May 24, 2002. She rose to fame in the 1980s. But that TV talk show ran until 2002, just short of 20 years in network syndication.

The World Is Yours

May 1937 

According to the Smithsonian, their "The World is Yours" series was one of the most successful educational radio programs of of the 1930s. It's a bit self-serving but the have some evidence. Shows had supplementary print materials which could be requested for 10 cents. The Smithsonian fulfilled 800,000 requests. A monthly magazine tied to the program eventually reached a circulation of 150,000. If you're interested in more details the book Science on the Air by Marcel LaFollette discusses it's production history.

The show was initially aired on the NBC Blue network but in October 1936 moved to the NBC Red Network. It aired on Sunday afternoons throughout, but the Jay Hickerson book Ultimate Guide to Network Programming notes that it aired on Saturdays 12/7/1940 thru 09/13/1941.  Hickerson also claims it was initially broadcast under the name "Treasure House", which is harder to corroborate. The program was sponsored in part by the U.S. Department of the Interior; Office of Education. Why not the Department of Education? That wasn't founded until the Regan Administration in 1980. [It's hard to imagine today, but Republicans used to be pro-education.]

It may come as no surprise that the program was funded by the WPA (Works Progress Administration.) It ran for six years and ran for 302 Episodes in total. Some sources state 303. [Full List HERE.] That first episode was a dramatic recreation of the founding of the Smithsonian, including an appearance by Charles Greeley Abbot, then secretary of the Smithsonian. He served from 1928 to 1944, so that included the full run of the radio program. Abbot oversaw the Smithsonian's participation in this and other WPA projects, but it's unclear what hand he had in the program beyond funding. The idea for the program actually originated with William Daw Boutwell at the Office of Education. More here and here. 

August 1936

Despite that longevity, and that large number of episodes, there is little written about the program, other than by the Smithsonian itself. The Review Vol. 35 No. 34 from July 1941 includes the whole script from a single episode. [SOURCE] That one script, by Irve Tunick, refers the the opening music merely as "melodious theme." In fact it was a song titled "Knowledge and the Great Doors" and composed by Rudolf Schramm.

Irve Tunick was a prolific script writer in both television and radio. Born in 1912, his radio career started in the 1930s at WINS-AM with Cowboy Tom's Roundup and he continued writing into the 1970s. He started on The World Is Yours at the age of 26. He also wrote episodes for The Eternal Light,  Freedom's People, Towards a Better World, Gallant American Women. Studio One, Democracy in Action, Armstrong Circle Theatre, , The Bold Ones, Bonanza, Ironside, Witness, Cavalcade of America, and CBS Is There to name a few.  He wrote every episode of The World Is Yours. 

Irve Tunick

Each episode was structured a a set of vignettes, some historical, others more documentary in nature. The subject could be an individual like Zebulon Pike, a specific topic like Aluminum, or a whole field, like American Plants.The host of  the program was the "Oldtimer" which was played by Tom Hoier throughout the series. Hoier was born in Denmark in 1877, so he was 60 when the program began.  He was a very experienced Broadway actor [SOURCE] The only other recurring character was Mona Jackson who was played by Elizabeth Morgan. 

January 1937

The final episode of "The World is Yours" was presented on May 10, 1942. The Oldtimer introduced the episode by explaining that it was "strangely fitting" that the topic of the last episode was Russia and the Soviet Union. In WWII Russia fought on the side of the allies against the Nazis, so the statement seems strange now. But with government funding comes government input. The comment foreshadows the "cold war" that followed victory in 1945. More here.

Secretary Abbot formed the Smithsonian War Committee in early1942 to provide Smithsonian expertise to the war effort. The staff provided expertise, and also created a number of pamphlets. In May of 1942 The World Is Yours was suspended due to the demands of the war effort. It seems strange of course, that the radio staff be halted for military intelligence. There's not a lot of voice actors doing double duty. For the governments part, they had been converting the WPA to Defense-related tasks since 1940. They hit "full employment" in 1942, and the last head of the WPA, Howard O. Hunter, served as head of the WPA from September 1940 to May 1, 1942. Roosevelt formally ended the program in December 1942. 

March 1940

The Smithsonian Archives kept approximately 138 recordings in the form of 300 sixteen-inch transcription discs from the series and scripts for another 59. The collection also includes quarter inch tapes. In 2019 The Smithsonian began digitizing the collection. Because the program was funded by the federal government, the episodes are public domain. 

Manitoba's Own Station

 

CKY Postcard (1926)

This postcard is undated. I assume it's from the 1930s based on the clothing and the enclosed ring-style microphone model. That looks like a Western Electric 600A carbon microphone. The room looks smokey but I don't see a cigarette, pipe or ashtray. It could be an artifact of black and white printing. Anyway, the text provides some information. 

"Prof. Herner conducted the first diploma radio  course in Canada over CKY. Agricultural College talks were introduced in this country by "Manitoba's Own Station" in 1923. "

The caption identified the man as M.C. Herner aka Milton Christian Herner.  He was born July 6th, 1880 in Waterloo, MB and died in 1964 at the age of 84. [SOURCE] He would have been 43 in 1923, so he was aging well. The professor was a published writer, he penned the text book Farm Poultry in Manitoba, [SOURCE] and a number of pamphlets and periodicals in the US and Canada on avian farming topics: breeding, feeding and marketing. The earliest of these I've found was published in 1905. [SOURCE] 

In a 1903 issue of the American Agriculturist I found a Classifieds ad where he was selling Barred Rock Cockerels out of Mannheim, ON. In 1906 Book Review Digest described him as the Director of the Manitoba Poultry Breeders Association. [SOURCE] Poultry Periodicals began describing him as a professor at M.A.C. around 1913, but he graduated in 1911. If you wanted to learn about the co-operative fattening of farm chickens, Herner was your man. There is nothing in his history that suggests he's a radio man, except this image. It presents a sort of mystery as to how it happened.

I did find one very similar postcard. It promoted Manitoba tourism on the front: hunting, fishing, beaches, and the $100 duty-free limit. But on the back it called out "Manitoba's Own Station" CKY-AM. Because of the tourist card, and the nominal dating evidence, I believe both postcards to be from the era when CKY was owned by the province. 

The very first Canadian radio broadcasting license was issued in the Spring of 1922. But the CBC wasn't formed until 1929, very much emulating the BBC. So you'd expect that all radio stations prior to that were privately owned. Radio Station CKY was the exception as a provincially owned station and why Manitoba went rogue is a matter of much very polite debate in Canada.

According to an account by Darby Coats in about 1920 the MTS bought a 100-watt radio transmitter for experimental use in sending radio telephone messages. The Commissioner  of the Manitoba Telephone Service (MTS) electrical engineer John Edmond Lowry found the disused transmitter in a shed and decided to repurpose it. At that time in 1923 there were only two radio stations in Manitoba. One was operated by the Free Press Newspaper and the other by the Tribune newspaper. representatives met with Lowryand through some means... agreed to bow out of broadcasting and cede the airwaves to the MTS. How exactly that happened is a matter of polite debate in Canada. [SOURCE]

CKY Studios

 

Since 1923 CKY has been the call sign of three radio stations in Winnipeg. The original CKY was formed in 1923 As described above.  The provincial government ran the station. I, late 1924 a federally-owned Canadian National Railway (CNR)  broadcasting station was licensed for Winnipeg. Far from creating competition, CNRW paid aover $14,000 in 1929, for example to rent equipment and facilities from CKY. 

The Manitoba history website describes CNRW as a phantom station.  This is Canada-specific terminology. It merely means that CNRW had no facilities of it's own and leased unused airtime from CKY. In the 1930s the federal government took over operations of the CNR radio network. This later became the CBC and n June 1948, the original CKY was purchased by the CBC and renamed CBW. The Manitoba government put out a press release about retiring the station. [SOURCE]  There is a scan of that release and its closing words are morbidly truncated...

 "Your radio station is going from one form of public ownership to another. Where the old station CKY belonged to You as citizens of Manitoba, this new station CBW will belong to you as citizens of Canada. Thus, when these few remarks, the last station call on CKY, come to an end, you can say with a continuing sense of ownership 'CKY is dead,...

The other two CKYs came directly from Lloyd Moffat, founder of Moffat Communications. His first station was CKBI, which he bought in 1931. He sold part of that to Ed Rawlinson and used the revenue in December of 1949 to start a new station in Winnipeg. Capitalizing on the heritage call sign, Moffat resurrected the CKY-AM call letters on 580. The new station played Top 40 through the 1960s and 1970s and flipped to Oldies in the 1980s. In the 1990s it became a Sports outlet. [SOURCE]

In 1963, Moffat also established the first CKY-FM, on 92.1 MHz. For a short period of time it was reputed to be the most powerful radio station in North America at 360,000 watts. [I think that claim excludes certain Mexican border blasters.] In the late sixties CKY-AM and CKY-FM, shared studios at 432 Main Street in Winnipeg. When they relocated to Polo Park after 1470 CFRW and CHIQ moved into the space. CKY was sold to Rogers Communications in 1992, and shut it down for a move to FM in 2004.  The CKY calls are still in use today on 102.3, still owned by Rogers.

I eventually found that same image of M.C. Herner in the  May 1st, 1926 issue of The Grain Growers' Guide, published by the United Farmers of Manitoba. [SOURCE] This firmly dates the postcard. It it describes the radio course in more detail, and that it has been broadcast by Herner for 3 years at that time. If you've ever raised chickens, you know the "peep peep peep" of baby chicks; so you can also imagine how that particular episode sounded. 

"The honor of conducting the first radio-diploma course in Canada fell some time ago to Professor M. C. Herner. For nearly three years. Professor Herner has been giving lectures at CKY on the care and management of poultry. These lectures have been noteworthy for their practical nature and for the interesting manner in which they have been delivered. Turkeys have been the principal subject of the diploma course now being conducted, and it is gratifying to know how greatly the professor’s radio work is appreciated throughout Manitoba and the Dakotas. This is evidenced by the number of students enrolled for the course and by the personal thanks he receives when he visits various centres. By way of adding '“atmosphere” to his talks, Professor Herner recently brought along a trio of baby chicks which chirped an accompaniment Domestic cats for hundreds of miles displayed an unusual interest in the radio program on this occasion."

The article was edited by D.R.P. Coats, the Director of CKY. That would be Douglas Richard Proctor “Darby” Coats. He was actually born in 1892, and more than a decade younger than Herner.  Coats wasn't even Canadian, he was born in England, only immigrating in 1910. He served as a wireless operator in WWI. After the war, he worked for Canadian Marconi Co. Ltd. from about 1920-1921. In 1923 he became the Manager of the Manitoba Telephone System radio station CKY in 1923. [SOURCE]