The Spamettes!

They were never actually called the Spamettes. Some sources claim they were nick-named the Spamettes, but this is apocryphal. Alas, in 1946, the Hormel Company started recruiting for for an all-female troupe of musicians to promote their processed meat products. But before I go any further into Spam-related history, I should note that Jill M. Sullivan and Danelle D. Keck wrote the definitive text on this topic: The Hormel Girls in 2007. Even Sullivan and Keck couldn't resist the inherent schmaltz of Spam. I'll quote:

 "On any given summer Sunday evening in 1948, one could hear on the Mutual Broadcasting System the sponsor of a popular program exclaim 'S-P-A-M! the first meat of its kind in America preferred by most people SPAM! Over eleven years ago the news sensation of the meat packing industry, SPAM. Today this miracle meat of many uses continues to maintain its leadership from coast to coast." 

It's hard to take Spam seriously. It has been around since 1937, and rose to prominence as a war-time food-stuff. But Hormel sold 122 million cans in 2011, a sales increase of 11% from 2009. In short... someone is eating it. Spam has been around for over 80 years. In 80 years as you might imagine they've done a wee bit of radio advertising. The image above is a print ad for the Burns & Allen show. But they have also advertised on radio.

In 1947 Jay Hormel put together a 20-member  all-women's bugle corps. The Hormel Girls were a drum and bugle corps of female WWII musicians. I should point out now that the recruiting process required all those ladies be white, and unmarried. The group toured and held parades in small towns. When they played the came with flag-bearers, and a drum and bugle corps. As an orchestra they added tuba, trombones dancers and expanded to more than 60 members. More here

 In 1948, the Hormel Girls debuted on radio. Music with the Hormel Girls became a top-rated weekend show on three different radio networks.  The program debut on ABC airing Saturdays at 6:30 PM following the Hour of Charm.  It was hosted by Betty Dougherty, and Elina Hart and the 30 minute show included both an orchestra and a chorus. Marilyn Wilson was the announcer. (Later Marilyn Wilson Ritter) They switched to CBS in May of 1950. Out of all 6 years of radio, there are only eight surviving 16-inch transcriptions discs of those Hormel Girls shows. More here and here. Marilyn later worked on KRCU public radio.

The original band was band was comprised of 20 former WACS(Women’s Army Corps), WAVES(Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service),SPARS (women’s reserve of the U.S. Coast Guard) and Marines.  According to Sullivan and Keck, they changed their style for radio.  By 1953, the show was number four in the yearly Nielsen rankings. But they disbanded within a year as Hormel refocused on TV advertising. More here.

The group was disbanded after a February1954 radio show.  But they have a strangely lasting legacy. The Hormel Girls held reunions in 1983 and 1991. The Hormel SPAM Museum in Austin, MN, opened in late 2001 and has an exhibit dedicated to the Hormel Girls. And Hormel didn't give up on radio they were sponsoring radio shows like Country Calendar as recently as 1987.

Radio Amway

Amway is infamous the world over as a direct-sale pyramid scheme. They are not generally known as a media company, but they once dabbled in that market. By once I mean from 1977 to 1983, the experiment lasted over a decade. More here.

It began on September 30th 1977 when Amway bought the Mutual radio Network. MBS had been founded in 1934 and by the late 1940s they were the largest radio network in America at least in terms of the raw number of members. In reality CBS and NBC were the Coke and Pepsi of radio networks. They had the lions share of the market, and most of the powerful stations. To quote Elizabeth McLeod

"Mutual shows were produced by the stations on a cooperative basis, and the stations paid the productions costs and furnished the facilities, not the network. This setup was radically different from that used by the Major Networks, so in that sense, one could call Mutual small."

 MBS kept trying to make itself into a bigger player. One of the biggest mistakes it made was in 1960 selling out to 3M. The adhesive company was a poor fit. 3M didn't damage the company but it left it directionless, and sold it to a group of mixed investors in 1966. Two of the shareholders, Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin F. Gilbert bought out the other share holders then sold MBS to Amway and turned a profit in the process.

Before this all Amway had done was underwriting and advertising. To be succinct, they had no idea what they were doing. But they certainly had gumption. About two months after the buy, they announced they were dropping landlines, and moving to satellite distributon via Western Union's Westar I.  The system went live in 1981. They were the first radio network to go to satellite.

Launched in 1973, Westar I was America's first domestic communications satellite. It was designed to operate for 7 years, but was removed from orbit in 1983 and replaced with Westar II. While the plans continued, Amway expanded MBS. They bought purchased WCFL in 1979 in 1980, Amway purchased WHN in New York and added affiliates. They peaked at 950, less than ABC, but more than NBC or CBS.  Amway may have been novices, but they were aggressive novices.

But being a novice has a downside.  Despite all these very exciting changes and expansions, Amway was taking a bath on the project. The move to satellite cost them 10 million dollars. When they dabbled in changing programming they experienced epic fail. they changed slots wrecking the ratings of highly rated show, change line ups, and tried to take shows on the road for no reason whatsoever. One of their few successes was the Larry King show on WIOD but that was probably because for the most part, they left Larry alone. For the most part, what they touched, they destroyed.

In 1984 they sold off WCFL to Statewide Broadcasting.  That same year they did a re-org and fired a number of executives and laid off over 20 Mutual staff. In September 1985 they sold the whole enchilada to Westwood One. The only thing they held back was their satellite services division and up-link facility. Amway went back to what they knew, they started making and selling satellite dishes.  But even that still had the stink of failure on it and they sold off the division was in 1989.

Winchellism

Walter Winchell was a petty and mean bastard. I want to make that clear. As inspiring as his story is, remember that. It's important not to lionize people. what's true is fantastic enough. He grew up poor on the Upper East Side. He built something from nothing, and he did it by hustling. He was a real prick, a megalomaniac, and a vindictive womanizer. I do quite like some of his contributions to the English language including the eponymous term "Winchellism" which applied to any number of his his invented words or phrases and more interestingly:

"A pejorative judgment that an author's works are specifically designed to imply or invoke scandal and may even be libelous."

He began in vaudeville, quickly finding that his talent was in writing about vaudeville more than singing or dancing. He wrote for the Vaudeville News starting in 1922 and left it for The Evening Graphic in 1924. It was there that he began making enemies with celebrities and friends with mobsters. Both situations gave him fodder for his column.On June 10th 1929 he was hired by the New York Daily Mirror where he finally became a syndicated columnist. That's when the real trouble began. At first Winchell wrote 4 days a week, then five, then he got a Sunday column. Eventually his column was syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers and read by 50 million people. Success there led to radio.

In 1931 he first began his weekly broadcasts for CBS. The Lucky Strike radio program gave him 5 minutes of airtime at the request of George Hill the president of American Tobacco. He was instantly popular. On March 29th, 1937 he debuted on NBC. Jergens sponsored a 15-minute Sunday night program The Jergens Journal, starring Winchell's high speed delivery. The book "The Secret Life of Walter Winchell" described it like this:

"The familiar staccato voice, heralding twelve and one half minutes of the Jergens Journal... Tapping a telegraph key wildly, though he bothered to learn Morse Code. Ripping at his necktie. Nuzzling against the microphone. Filling his hatband with nervous sweat. Gobbling at twenty million pairs of ears. "

He began each episode with the phrase "Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press." His banter was clocked at an average of 197 words per minute. While his column focused on gossip, his radio program included a lot of international news giving it a greater air of seriousness. Despite his sensationalist reputation for Hollywood gossip he was also one of the first American journalists to criticize Adolf Hitler in the build up to WWII.

On June 15, 1945, NBC Blue officially became the ABC Network, Winchell rolled on with a different emblem on his microphone. The Jergens Journal ran until December 26th 1948 when Winchell made the leap to Television. It was later renamed "The Woodbury Journal" for their new sponsor. His ABC television program was sponsored by Gruen Watches, and simulcast on ABC radio until 1955. He got into an argument with ABC executives and they canned him. He sued and went to the much smaller Mutual Network.

Winchell a rabid anti-communist had supported Senator Joe McCarthy [R]. Thought Winchell had turned on McCarthy at the end, it had left him stained somewhat and his career was in decline. The fight that would end his career was brewing. He and Jack Paar didn't get along. Paar had been on the Lucky Strike Program as well so they had crossed paths around 1931 only do so again in 1957. Paar had reemerged from Quiz-show exile to host the Tonight Show. Winchell gave Paar the treatment. He said that Paar was having marital problems. Paar denied it, but the fact is, Paar married and divorced the same woman twice. It wasn't a stretch. But Paar had a platform from which to fire back. He said that Winchell never voted (which was untrue) and that his column was "written by a fly." He called him a "silly old man" and went on to mock Winchell's high pitched voice. Ironically it was Paar who had to make a retraction. More here.

Paar kept up the pressure and in a series of attacks in 1959 he read passages from the book "The Secret Life of Walter Winchell." It was a hit piece written by Lyle Stewart that gave Winchell the treatment he'd given everyone else. At the same time Winchell's home base newspaper The New York Daily Mirror was floundering under a prolonged strike. The newspaper went under in 1962 and Winchell was cast adrift and to faded into obscurity. He retired from the Mutual Network in 1969.

Johannes Steel radio commentator

Johannes Steel, a newspaperman and radio commentator whose career was marked by controversy. He was pro-labor, and some called him a communist. Ironically, he self-identified as an Eisenhower republican. He is an interesting newscaster in WWI so interesting in fact you'll see marked differences between his listing on the German Wikipedia page and the English one. To American history he was a crank. A commie, a pro-union loud-mouth. To the Germans he was a Jew, a socialist that fled Germany when the Nazis took power to fling stones at them from afar.

In 1940 Sam Romer wrote a memo to Sidney Hertzberg about anti-war network commentators. Johannes Steel was listed as an "anti-interventionist." His commentary was listed as 7:45 PM daily on WMCA. Of course in Romers thoroughness most of the WMCA staff was listed including: Burnett Hershey, Sidney Mosley and Bruce Oliver were all listed as well. The inclusion is dubious as steel was notoriously anti-Nazi. His 15 minute program was sponsored by the Monarch Wine Company and Simon Akerman clothes.

It was programming like that which put WMCA on the chopping block with the FCC. they fell on the wrong side of the fairness doctrine. I find it interesting that conservatives rail against it today in hyperbole, but in the past they used it to railroad liberals. In 1939 they were even accused of treason. More here.

"Last week station WMCA, New York City, was asked to show cause why its license should not be revoked for violations of the federal communications act of 1934. The Manhattan station allegedly picked up, decoded and broadcast messages by German and British governments to their respective forces. Officials of the station denied the charge but will have to prove the denial in a public hearing in Washington..."

Steel escaped Germany knowing that his membership in the SPD could have led to his demise. He went to France and eventually America where he later became a citizen. He became the foreign editor of The New York Post and a columnist for the Daily Compass. He did news commentary on the Mutual Radio Network. In 1939 he began on air commentaries at WMCA. Sometimes this is listed in his biographies at WHN, but the WHN calls only came into use in 1962. In 1948 he was fired, probably because the Red Channels report tied 34 commie connections to him; more than any other broadcaster. He attribute the firing to pressure from the Catholic Church. In 1949 he took a job commenting for WLIB.

Later in his life he wrote a syndicated financial column in The Waterbury Republican-American newspaper. He died in 1988, at 80 years old.