Matinee with Bob and Ray

 

 

Somehow I missed the memo on Bob and Ray. They were on the air for 50 years and I completely missed the boat, discovering them only post-mortem, in the form of a beat up paperback with an introduction by Andy Rooney. Bob and Ray were Bob Elliott (1923–2016) and Ray Goulding (1922–1990). My own mother often said "Write if you get work!" as people left the house. It took me decades to realize she was quoting Bob & Ray.

Elliott and Goulding began as radio announcers. Elliott and Goulding were both on 850 WHDH-AM in Boston. Elliot was an announcer and Goulding a DJ with a morning show. (Some biographies switch the roles and describe Elliot as a DJ and Goulding as a newscaster.) The book Bob and Ray: Keener Than Most Persons by David Pollack gives another version where Elliot presented a demo for Back Bay Matinee he based on an AFRS program. The Music Director Ken Wilson put him on air every afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00. Then Wilson paired him with Goulding to improvise banter as a fill-in when Red Sox baseball broadcasts rained out. Elliott and Goulding (not yet known as Bob and Ray) would improvise and joke around with the studio musicians. It was a comedy recipe you see to this day on late night programs; from Johnny Carson through Jimmy Kimmel. The duo started writing skits to make it work.

Their shtick was a slight twist on the old vaudeville routine. It wasn't a matter of which one was the Straight man. They were both the straight man; something Elliott conceded to Mike Sacks, for the book Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations With Today’s Top Comedy Writers.  “We were both sort of straight men reacting against the other.” Every punchline is silly but completely deadpan, prefiguring Stephen Wright but without the irony. Their trademark sign-off was "This is Ray Goulding reminding you to write if you get work"; "Bob Elliott reminding you to hang by your thumbs." 

After a few months WHDH gave them a morning show simply called Bob & Ray in 1946.  The program started as a 15-minute slot and then expanded to half an hour. The show continued to expand. In the fall of 1947, the pair were given a daily half hour at 1:00 PM called Matinee with Bob and Ray. In 1949 WHDH increased power from 5,000 watts to 50,000 watts and wildly expanded it's coverage and the audience for the duo. After 5 years in Boston, they got a 13-week contract with NBC and started a one hour Saturday Night program in 1951. By 1952 they also had an early morning show on WNBC as well. More here.

In 1955 they signed a new contract with WBZ: Matinee with Bob and Ray but by April of  1956 they terminated their taped WBZ program because they were so busy with their network schedule. Alan Dary got the spot. Bob & ray continued to do daily shows for the Mutual network from 1955 to 1957, then CBS from 1959 to 1960, and on New York station WINS. In 1962 they moved to WHN to start an afternoon show and in 1973 WOR doing a 4-hour afternoon drive program.  In their final incarnation they started a program on NPR: The Bob & Ray Public Radio Show. That ran until 1987. They won three Peabody Awards for their radio work and were inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1984 and the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1995.

Goulding died in 1990. Born in 1922 he was 68. Many assumed the 67 year old Elliot might retire but instead he became a cast member of Garrison Keillor’s American Radio Company of the Air,  which briefly replaced A Prairie Home Companion on NPR.  Then he started making appearances in movies, and commercials something deeply ironic for a man who had made so many fake advertisements. Ellior once said "By the time we discovered we were introverts, it was too late to do anything about it.”

Bradley Kincaid's Favorite Mountain Ballads

Bradley Kincaid was born in Point Leavell, KY and I have the post card to prove it. But built his music career in the northern states. His first radio appearance came in 1926 when he performed on the National Barn Dance show on WLS-AM in Chicago, IL. Kincaid was born in 1895 so he was already 31 when he first stood facing the microphone at WLS-AM. So lets back up so we can have a little continuity here.

At the age of 14 his father gave him a guitar that he got in trade for a fox hound. That has got to be the best story in the history of country music. At the age of 19 he entered the Berea College Foundation School as a sixth-grader but left less than 2 years later to fight in WWI. After the war he resumed his education at Berea and graduated from the academy in 1921 at the age of 26.  He then moved to Chicago to attend Y.M.C.A. College. It's now known as George Williams College. There he joined a singing quartet which led to his famous 1928 solo audition for the National Barn Dance.

Throughout that time he collected folk songs. It was his passion. In addition to collecting song books he wrote country songs and his song books sold big time. His 1928 songbook called My Favorite Mountain Ballads sold more than 400,000 copies. He spent 4 years on WLS and paired up with Louis Marshall “Grandpa” Jones. He went onto play at WBZ-AM in Boston, at WHAM in Rochester in 1939, WLW in Cincinnati in 1941, and on WKRC-AM, with Cowboy Copas on the Cornhuskers Jamboree in 1945.


His last major radio gig was a stretch on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville from 1942-1947 on WSM-AM. He did continue to perform but less and less on radio. He was mostly retired by the 60s but continued to record into the 1970s. In 1971, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He died in 1989. His papers reside at Berea College. More here.

Gretchen McMullen's Radio Cooking School

Gretchen McMullen's Radio Cooking School on 590 WEEI-AM from Boston and was designed to supplement lessons broadcasted from January to July, 1928.  The book was compiled to promotes the "Housekeeper's Chat" radio show on WEEI.

It was one of the earliest cooking/housekeeping programs , but it turned out to be long-lived. The show was not only still running 14 years later, just not on WEEI.  By then also syndicated on all 12 Yankee Network stations: WNAC-AM, WICC-AM, WEAN-AM, WLLH-AM, WRDO-AM, WTAG-AM, WSAR-AM, WCSH-AM, WLBZ-AM, WTIC-AM, WNBH-AM, and WFEA-AM. That's  according to the December 10th 1938 issue of Radio Guide.  But it's congruous with WNAC being a part in the Yankee Network after 1930. More here.

Alexander Russo refers to her in his book Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio Beyond the Networks. Apparently John Shepard III had a hand in co-branding “The Gretchen McMullen Household Hour.” More here. The book is worth reading on it's own merits.

In 1941 she appears in the Radio yearbook on the staff of WBZA, and in 1942 she's noted in a 1942 issue of Broadcasting as taking a job at WBZ as a part of the new England Regional Network. The article also describes her as a food expert with 15 years broadcasting experience.  That matches nicely with a start date +/- 1 year from the publication of the that cook book. But where she went after 1943, I have no idea...

Celia Mayer and Aunt Sammy

I wrote a post about Aunt Sammy back in  June of 2007. Recently I struck it lucky and was contacted by Paul Freirich, the son of a woman that played the part of Aunt Sammy on WBZA in Boston (see above.) Paul told me what he knew about her and her time in radioland and then even a bit about his own radio career. Between the emails and the 45 minutes of tape I have enough material for a few posts. I'll start with Aunt Sammy tonight and then get to Paul career later on.

Just to review...Aunt Sammy herself was a character created by the U. S. Department of Agriculture Bureau of Home Economics. It debuted in 1926 and by the early 1930s was carried on about 200 radio stations. It was a 15-minute short about cooking, and home making. The show ran until 1946. Celia Mayer was Aunt Sammy in the 1930s. More here. I have found very little information about the women who played Aunt Sammy. But fortunately some people take an interest in their family history, and a few of those even feel like sharing... 

JF: When did your mother play "Aunt Sammy" on WBZA?
PF: She never gave me exact dates but let's use a little detective work. She's at a WBZA mic and WBZA went back to Springfield and Boston get the WBZ call sign in 1931 [March of 1931] so it was before that. She worked at the Statler hotel and WBZA moved there in late 1928 or early 29 so it was after that. [More Boston radio history here]

JF:How old would she have been then?
PF:In 1930 she would have been 23 years old.

JF:How did she score that gig?
PF:She was a secretary at WBZA. For some reason she stayed through her lunch hour one day to get some work finished. The noon program on WBZA was organ music from the Pump Room at the Hotel Statler. That same day the organ broke down and they had dead air. Gordon Swann, the station PD came running into the office with one of the USDA scripts and my mother was the only one there. Swann thrust the script into her hands and said, "You're on the air". Mom was smart enough to realize that many women get nervous in front of of a mic and their voices go way up in pitch so she deliberately lowered hers. It must have worked because she was on the air for six months until they sold that time to a different sponsor who put a different program into that time slot. [More WBZ/WBZA history here]

JF:Did she do any other work in radio before or after that?
PF:No.

JF:There were different Aunt Sammys in Different regions. Did she know any of the others?
PF:She never mentioned any so I don't think so.

JF:How long do you think she stayed there?
PF: She was there for six months on the air. I don't know how long after that she stayed working there. I can tell you for a fact that she married my father in 1934. But I heard she was not there much longer after she was off the air. But a funny thing, she showed me a fan letter "You gave me your recipe for pecan pie and it's wonderful, and I haven't never been able to make it before and yours came out beautifully." But she couldn't make pecan pie. [The USDA provided all the recipes]

The June Foray

June Foray is still alive, she's 92 and even still working in the voice-over industry that made her famous. She is best known as the voice of many animated characters including both Natasha Fatale and Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Cindy Lou Who, and Jokey Smurf. She was born in 1917, in Boston, the second of three children. She was first on the radio at the age of 12 in a local Radio drama on WBZA.

The WBZA calls are not a typo, but they may be unfamiliar even to Boston-area readers. WBZ and WBZA were sisters stations in Boston. The callsign was first used in in 1924. In March of 1931, WBZ and WBZA swapped call letters moving WBZ to Boston and WBZA to Springfield. WBZA carried a simulcast of WBZ until it went dark in 1962. June claims to have been on the station at the age of 12 that would have been about 1929, which fits right into the window. More here. In an article in Nostalgia Digest she indicated that the first appearance was not on WBZA but another unnamed Boston area station but that WBZA was at least contemporary to the appearance. She was quoted as follows:

"Well my teacher had a radio show and I was on it. Then there was a weekly radio show on WBZA, the local station. They had a group of actors and I had the hubris to call them..."

Her first work in Network radio was about 15 years later in 1943 on Cavalcade of America a program sponsored by DuPont about American history. In 1945 she was on Smile Time, a comedy program on the Don Lee Network and simultaneously on the Buster Brown gang Program on NBC. She went on to appear on Lux Radio Theater and an innumerable list of programs. She appeared on Steve Allen's 15-minute morning program in LA, on 1330 KFAC-AM. In 1948 when Steve Allen launched "It's a great Life" on CBS Radio June came too. She stuck with radio while she moved in to TV work even picked up a spot on the Stan Freberg radio show in 1957 also on CBS.

In 2008 the ASIDFA gave out it's first June Foray award and June was it's first recipient. The award is given to "individuals who have made a significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation." More recently she made the web 2.0 leap in October 2006, she appeared in the podcast "The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd" portraying Susan B. Anthony. Last year she finally wrote her autobiography "Did You Grow Up With Me, Too?"

8XK, 8XS, W8XK

It was 8XS in Saxonburg that transmitted the first international broadcast, to Europe via England, on New Year's Eve in 1923. 86 years ago 8XS was owned by Westinghouse. An article in "What's on the Air" from February, 1931 lists their frequency as 19.72 Kilocycles; broadcasting Wednesdays and Saturdays from 7:00 am to 11:00 am. It aired programs from NBC's international network called "the White Network" by some. It ran all religious content.
I was going to go into the history a bit but I'll take this opportunity to shill for Fybush and jsut quote the master directly:

"At Saxonburg, KDKA experimented with shortwave broadcasting, with medium-wave power levels as high as 400 kW and with several antenna designs that were complex (and apparently unsuccessful) prototypes of today's low-profile antenna designs, such as the Kinstar and Paran antennas. The Saxonburg site remained in use for shortwave (under the W8XK calls) until the end of the war, and was eventually donated to the nuclear physics program at [Carnegie Mellon.]"

8XK was Dr. Frank Conrad's old experimental call from 1916 it was canceled in 1917 and re-licensed as 8XK in 1920. He began broadcasting KDKA programs on shortwave in 1923 as 8XS. Westinghouse was attached to the calls so when they launched a WBZ in Boston, it's first experimental calls were W1XK, and WBOS which became W2XK. In the 1930s all shortwave was still experimental and all of them started with experimental calls in this era. All experimental calls consisted of the letter "W" followed by a number representing the "radio district" then an "X" then two or three letters. More here.

Westinghouse had to hand over the reins to The Government in WWII for operation under the Voice of America network. In 1939 the experimental W1XK calls were replaced with the more traditional calls WPIT.

The first stations in each state

I didn't do the research on this, but I did check their list twice. I also re-sorted it into chronological order. This is a list of the first licensed radio stations in each U.S. state. Well all know KDKA, and WQAM, and WBZ but the rest are surprises. Also surprising is how long some states took to get it together. It's very interesting, and the rest of the National Radio Club website is also well worth the browsing. http://www.nrcdxas.org/

I've tried to space it out to be more readable in Blogger but I've been thwarted by it's "smart corrections" at each attempt. I recommend you click the header to see their work in it's original and more readable glory.

1. KDKA Pittsburgh, PA Oct 27, 1920
2. KQL Los Angeles, CA Oct 13, 1921
3. WCJ New Haven, CT Sep 29, 1921
4. WQAM Miami, FL Feb 1921
5. WDZ Tuscola, IL Mar 17, 1921
6. WGAZ South Bend, IN Sep 25, 1921
7. WBZ Springfield, MO Sep 15, 1921
8. WWJ Detroit, MI Oct 13, 1921 
9. WEW St. Louis, MO Apr 26, 1921
10. WOU Omaha, NE Dec 29, 1921
11. WJZ Newark, NJ Jun 1, 1921
12. WJX New York, NY Oct 13, 1921
13. WLW Cincinnati, OH Mar 3, 1921
14. WKY Oklahoma, OK City Apr 21, 1921
15. WRR Dallas, TX Feb, 1921
16. KFC Seattle, WA Dec 8 1921
17. KFXZ Logan, UT 1922, (moved to ID)
18. WGH Montgomery, AL Feb 3, 1922
19. KFAD Phoenix, AZ Jun 21, 1922
20. WOK Pine Bluff, AR Feb 10, 1922
21. KLZ Denver, CO Mar 10, 1922
22. WHAV Wilmington, DE Jul 30, 1922
23. WSB Atlanta, GA Mar 15, 1922
24. KGU Honolulu, HI May, 1922
25. KFXD Logan, UT 1922
26. WOC Davenport, IA Feb 18, 1922 
27. WEY Wichita, KS Mar 23, 1922
28. WHAS Louisville, KY Jul 18, 1922
29. WWL New Orleans, LA Mar 31, 1922
30. WKC Baltimore, MD Mar 23, 1922
31. WLB Minneapolis, MN Jan 13, 1922
32. KFBB Great Falls, MT Jul 11, 1922
33. WKAV Laconia, NH Aug, 1922
34. KOB Albuquerque, NM May, 1922
35. WBT Charlotte, NC Apr 10, 1922
36. WDAY Fargo, ND May 23, 1922
37. KGG Portland, OR Mar 15, 1922
38. WEAN Providence, RI Jun 5, 1922
39. WCAT Rapid City, SD May 9, 1922
40. WKN Memphis, TN Mar 23, 1922 
41. WCAX Burlington, VT June, 1922 
42. WHD Morgantown, WV Mar 16, 1922 
43. WHA Madison, WI Jan 13, 1922
44. WTAR Norfolk, VA Sep 21, 1923
45. KFQD Anchorage, AK Apr, 1924 
46. WCSH Portland, OR Jul 24, 1925
47. WDBT Hattiesburg, MS May 1, 1925
48. KOH Reno, NV Oct 25, 1928
49. WSPA Spartanburg, SC Nov, 1929
50. KDFN Casper, WY Jan 2, 1930
    

AMRAD: the only station in Boston

The Boston newspapers wrote very little about radio until 1922. So much of the history of AMRAD and 1XE, relies on oral histories and letters of former staff. In as much please under stand that at least some of their official history is fish-tale. Behind it all is Harold J. Power, a life-time radio geek. He ran an amateur station out of his home at the age of 10 all driven by an obsession with the work of Marconi.

The American Radio and Research Corporation, or AMRAD, was founded in 1915 Harold J. Power. AMRAD was the epicenter of radio innovation in both broadcast and manufacture in Boston prior to 1922. Harold was a Tufts alumnus and negotiated with the University to get some land to use for their radio experiments. It was there ton the Tufts campus they built a 300+ foot tall tower and founded 1XE. Their call letters were later changed to WGI and on the manufacturing side AMRAD also manufactured parts for both domestic and military radio. More here.

What mystifies me is that WBZ is generally thought of as the first Boston radio station, one that followed immediately after KDKA. Westinghouse owned both KDKA and WBZ and I guess they had the publicity budget. WBZ began operating in Springfield in September of 1921 and didn't officially do any broadcasting from Boston till late February of 1924. That makes them not the first, or at least not the first in Boston.

In 1917, AMRAD received a license for station 1XE, and experimental broadcasts began on a fairly regular basis that same year. That beats WBZ by 7 years. Granted these were not always radio programs. Some broadcasts were more code practice, but 1XE was on air almost daily.

AMRAD kept running partially through funding from the receivers they made for the military. This continued in 1918, when all amateur stations were shut down by the government. It was this core business that kept the staff together until 1918 when they were allowed to go back on air. 1XE's volunteer staff came back to the microphone. Local radio fans, Tufts students,
musicians and theater, even political figures saw the benefit of being on the new station.

In early February of 1922, 1XE officially became WGI. Although at times it was confused with the bigger and more powerful station WGY in Schenectady, the station kept the WGI call letters but emphasized their AMRAD connection wherever possible. But financial problems mounted in late 1923 and the station was off the air due to equipment failure many times. Staff began to leave for other newer more powerful local stations.

In February of 1925, WGI changed its call letters to WARC and began to day-share with religious station (calls unknown?) April of 1925, with no announcement, WARC simply vanished, there was no announcement and they did not notify the commerce department. Tufts took their building back. The weak WGI transmitter was taken apart and sold. And wherever it's parts were used reception was terrible. Its poor manufacture curse stations such as WBET and they too went bankrupt.

Today the WARC calls reside in Meadville, PA on the Allegheny College station these days but the WGI calls remain extinct.