BOOK WEEK: Radio's Golden Years

The book Radio's Golden Years: The Encyclopedia Of Radio Programs 1930-1960 was written by Vincent Terrace in 1981. The book includes the cast, and crew and air dates of virtually every radio program from the years listed. That works out to over 1,500 radio programs. As a reference book it's short on adjectives, listing sometimes only the type of program, host, length, network and year it aired. But there are numerous programs for which this is the only source of information whatsoever. It's a shame that the hardback printing by A.S Barnes & Company was so shoddy. Every copy of the book I've found has a dried out and split binding. I've re-glued my own copy several times.

Author Vincent Terrace is not a college professor, though he does have a  BFA from New York Institute of Technology.  He also wrote the Encyclopedia of Television Shows, 1925 Through 2010, and a number of other media reference books. It was while doing research for those earlier books those that he discovered a basic lack of reference material on OTR programs. He's still alive and active today and serves as the Television Historian at McFarland Publishers. He's even on Linkedin.