Texas Mary on KFAB

Mary Marsich, aka Texas Mary died in 2008. She had performed as yodeling country western singer on KFAB-AM in Omaha, NE for 46 years. Despite that tenure there is precious little written about her career. She was not an Omaha native but spent most of her life there. She was born in Iowa, in 1917 and didn't return there until 1995.

There is so little written about her that I first heard of her from her obituary. Billboard referred to her less than half a dozen times over her career. I can guess from her birth date that she started at KFAB around 1938 and retired in the early 1980s. Her few press clippings seem to confirm that time line.

She  first appears in billboard in August of 1943. She was already sufficiently famous to get written up over her recovery from a "bone disease" and her return to KFAB from the Mayo clinic. It said that "Texas Mary made 17 trips to the hospital and underwent 13 operations at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. in her fight for health that finally returned. The flood of mail, flowers and candy from KFAB fans that followed her caused her doctors to ask if she came from Hollywood." At the time  She had a 15-minute daily broadcast at the time and had been with the station about 5 years.

By the mid 1940s she was a part o a larger group, Eddie Sosby and the Radio Rangers. They broadcast  three times and Mary was a draw. Another Billboard article noted in 1948 she was still with the band doing a new program "Hi, Neighbor!" a  45-minute long show.  At the time the line up included Texas Mary, Alene McKinney, the Melody Masters and the Uptowners. The article somewhat indicates that she's performing with the band as opposed to as a member of the band. It's unclear. In 1950 the Radio Rangers signed a deal with 4-Star records. That same year they appear on WOW-AM, another Omaha station. It's hard to tell if they were playing both stations or had crossed the street. But either way, it appears that Texas Mary didn't make the trip to 4-Star or WOW.

Jessie Young's Radio Cake

KMA signed on in 1925, an pioneer station in radioland. Jessie Young started at KMA-AM in Shenandoah, Iowa in 1926. She had performed on the station in a choir on it's first broadcasting day on January 17th. Later she went on to singing duets with her husband Floyd on air.  Then she began writing advertising copy and working as an announcer. Then she got her own show. The "Stitch and Chat Club"was pure mid-western Americana. The show gained local popularity and was renamed renamed "A Visit with Jessie Young," after it's increasingly popular host. More here.

It was a homemaker show, not a cooking show. You have to remember that in some of these rural areas there was no electricity. So home making didn't include modern conveniences like electric stoves, irons or washing machines; and the microwave wasn't to debut at retail for another 2 decades. Jessie wasn't teaching about bisquick pancakes. He had to cover soap-making, lard-saving, meat smoking, canning, curing, salting, and the butchering of water fowl. KMA engineers wired her home so that on Saturdays the show could include her family and be broadcast from her kitchen. Her son Robert performed playing the Novacord and she and her husband Floyd sang harmony. Her mother Rosa Susanka appeared sometimes as well. Her other children Eileen, Ronnie and Richard often appeared as well. The book Neighboring on the Air by Evelyn Birkby covers her story in great detail.

In 1942 she relocated to Philadelphia with her family and did another show for 2 years. sick of damn Yankees they went back to the Midwest and resettled in Nebraska and broadcast from KFAB. She relocated to Colorado and then began taping her program and mailing them in to KFAB. In 1946 she launched a magazine based on her radio program which then was in it's 20th year. She retired from broadcastign in 1955, but continued to publish the magazine until 1980!  By then she had authored 20 books on the various home making arts including sewing and cooking.She died in 1987.

Top 40 begins

The vile radio recipe we call CHR is a direct descendant of Top 40 radio. Top 40 has largely gone the way of the dodo fully replaced by CHR. In evolution when two species compete for the same resources, one eventually has to eat the other.

Top 40 can actually be traced very directly to one man Todd Storz. Storz was heir to the Storz family fortune, from the Storz Brewing Company. In 1940s they were the most popular beer in Nebraska. You have never heard of them because they brewery closed in 1972 after selling out to some drunks in Minneapolis. Point being, the boy had some cash on hand. He wasn't just a rich kid though. Before 660 KOWH-AM, Todd had already worked at KBON-AM as an announcer and for Station KFAB-AM in sales.

Todd owned of KOWH-AM in Omaha with his father Robert H. Storz. You'll see some confusing accounts because he and his father are both named Robert Storz. When Time magazine wrote about him in 1956 and called him "the fasted rising figure in U.S. radio." They called him R. Todd Stortz. They made top 40 sound like crap. The article is well worth reading.

"Storz... allows his stations only 60 records at a time, lets them play only the 40 top tunes of the week, well larded with commercials."

The legend is that in 1954 Todd and his assistant Bill Stewart were at a bar across the street from KOWH-AM in Omaha and he noticed that it's patrons played the same songs over and over. Something clicked in his head He decided that popularity could be measured, and that repetition was key. Storz has told the story a few times, a few different ways. A less popular version has the bar near or on an army base in WWII -same realization, just a little earlier.

Regardless of when or where, I believe the venue. Before that moment, radio stations still used block programming, and a full-service structure reigned. A single station might play Classical, hillbilly, gospel news, and radio dramas in the same day. Here, a machine indicated preference like a ballot box. Todd thought the jukebox was closer to what people wanted to hear.

One documentary completely discards the anecdote and says that in 1950 the University of Omaha performed radio research that indicated that listeners tuned into radio mostly for the music. It more broadly says that Storz was also influenced shows as Your Hit Parade and Lucky Lager Dance Time, programs that already had repetition and rotation. I don't see the theories as mutually exclusive. A programmer can read research and still have a separate eureka moment. Today we take ad nauseum repetition as a given in radio. At the time it was a novelty. His application of it as a format was definitely a first and we know exactly where that happened.

Stortz bought KOWH-AM, a daytimer in 1949. In 1954 Todd took over as PD and launched his brazen new format. It was not rock radio. The mix was simply whatever was popular, there was no loyalty of any kind. they played instrumentals. novelty tunes, pop hits whatever topped the jukebox. I should also note that Gordon McLendon also gets some credit for the invention of Top 40. But he's a Texan, and in Texas they teach that Texans invented and founded everything. McLendon was a great radioman who had many firsts, but Top 40 wasn't one of them.

Todd Storz's died suddenly of a a cerebral hemorrhage, at age 39, in 1964. Todd was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1987. 660 AM in Omaha today is KCRO-AM a poorly rated Christian talker.