The Old Time Radioguy

Ask anyone around you about what is current in entertainment today, and you will most likely hear about something that is popular on television or on the Web, or some video game, or DVD. “Dancing With the Stars,” CSI,” and “Law and Order” editions largely capture the attention and imagination of audiences watching television at home. It was not that long ago that radio was the primary form of electronic home entertainment around the world, especially in the
US, before television. 

It is easy to look back on the past and focus only on those things that are pleasant and non-threatening to the memory. History is full of events, sounds, and images that teach and reprimand us. There are many lessons to be learned, through the acknowledgement and study of events and personalities from the past. We see this in the matter of television history, from its earliest days as a perceived threat to the motion picture industry, through the time known as the Golden Age of Television, to the medium’s rise as the dominant force in journalism in the 1960s and 1970s. The progression continues through the 1980s to the present, with the television industry’s reckoning with the business and finance worlds, and competition with emerging technologies. 

The paradigm for television was actually established by the radio broadcasting industry on many levels. One level was that of the programs and programming placed on the broadcast schedules. Another level was the matter of the conflicts and battles that were waged between talent and broadcast management, as well as those between the radio networks and government regulators. There are stories both well known and not so well known, recounting the accomplishments of celebrities, performers, writers, musicians and others, which have not always been told to younger generations. These accounts are very much in danger of disappearing altogether from fading memories behind the curtain of the mists of time. 

We live in a time when information has become a commodity that is often taken for granted. The comic styles, timing, and delivery of performers as Jay Leno, David Letterman and Jon Stewart are easily traced back to what audiences first listened to, via the dry and satiric wit of predecessor comics such as Fred Allen. The programming largely found on public broadcasting vehicles such as “Masterpiece” and “Great Performances” owe the models for their existence to radio efforts as the various incarnations of the “CBS Workshop” and programs such as “The Voice of Firestone.” The issues of performers and programs needing to remain interesting to the public while financially profitable – ratings – are by no means a new or unique phenomenon. Again, radio history provides a rich and vast history of these and other issues. 

This blog and its blogger are committed to sharing the history of the medium of radio to those who may be unaware of it, or have even forgotten about it. Radio itself is still present, to be sure, but in a wider variety of forms and formats that our grandparents may not have been able to begin to imagine. In addition to the radio boxes themselves, there are the units that accompany a typical home entertainment system, or clock, and there is also a relatively new development, satellite radio. There are the various formats of talk and music, as well as news and public affairs. All of these descend from the period known as Old Time Radio (OTR), generally placed from the early 1920s to 1962, with the end of regular network series broadcasting. By the count of the Old Time Radioguy, your correspondent, this is nearly forty years. It is the stories and personalities of this period that I am going to share with you, the reader, in this blog.

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