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Historical
Note: "Klondike 9366"
The True-Life Story of "It's Your Nickel"
VICTOR: "It could be a whole new kind of radio!...someone in the dark, telling all." Little did Victor know what powerful spells he was trying to conjure. "Talk radio" is one of the major social and entertainment phenomena of the last forty years. Its popularity has survived advances in technology; the words "You're on the air!" still carry the electric appeal they did decades ago. However, outside of WENN, the conjuring took a bit longer. "Talk radio" wasn't created so much as it evolved, between the mid-1930s and the late 1950s. The so-called golden age of radio exploited many elements of the call-in talk show -- live interviews, hot-topic debates, and audience participation. One of the earliest uses of the telephone in a popular radio program was in "Major Bowes' Original Amateur Hour" (NBC, and later CBS, 1935-45), which from the start of its run invited portions of its listeners to vote on contestants by calling the show's phone number (MUurray Hill 8-9933). Programs such as "Vox Pop" (various networks, 1935-48) gained favor with offbeat man-in-the-street interviews using remote microphones, and others such as "America's Town Meeting of the Air" (NBC Blue/ABC, 1935-56) provided some of the rancorous political and social debate that would flourish in the coming talk-show days. ("In each [Town Meeting] audience...was 'a scattered but recurrent percentage of irresponsibles, drunks, and crackpots'...[T]he guests themselves often came to the edge of violence." (Dunning, p. 30)). A public-affairs program, "Listen, America" (NBC Blue, 1941-42), offered listeners a chance to phone in questions which were relayed to a panel of experts. Technical limitations, and FCC restrictions on use of phone lines for broadcast purposes, discouraged local stations and network programs from attempting to broadcast live on-the-air caller comments in the 1930s and 1940s. But there is reason to believe that as early as the 1930s a handful of local "record jockeys" (the term "disc jockey" first gained wide currency in 1941) would take calls from listeners and repeat the caller's comments over the air as they were spoken. (One assumes that they didn't go to the extent that Mackie and Celia did.) Between the late 1940s and mid-1950s, a primitive call-in talk show of this type had emerged on a number of local stations. Pittsburgh had an early entry called "Party Line," on KDKA, in which hosts Ed and Wendy King invited calls, paraphrased listener comments on the air, and offered trivia-question prizes. (In the spirit of Jeff, they invited letters as well; one of their slogans was "There's never a busy signal at the mailbox"). A nightclub-remote program called "Chez Show" on Chicago's WMAQ, featuring the later-famous Mike Wallace and his wife, Buff Cobb, also paraphrased caller remarks for the audience. On Boston's WBOS, host Jim Fitzgerald would greet callers with the words "Hello telephone!" and recite their comments on the air ("You say your favorite band is Freddy Martin?"). These shows, and others like them, generally were slated in the late-night hours. But who put that first phone call on the air..."live"? There's no way of knowing for sure, but one claimant to the title is Barry Gray, who disc-jockeyed an overnight music show for New York's WOR in 1945. "According to Gray, the whole concept developed accidentally when, bored with his show at about three o'clock one morning, he answered his phone and conversed *on the air* with the caller, who happened to be Woody Herman. As time went on, Gray's show had more talk and less music." (Munson, p. 36). Gray went on to host a long-running call-in show on WMCA in New York and has been hailed as "the pioneer of talk radio." The mid-1950s saw he emergence of several modern-style call-in shows, such as "Party Line," on WCOG in Greensboro, N.C. -- which put callers on the air on a ten-second delay. Profiled in a 1954 Newsweek article, host Bob Jones readily admitted to looking for cantankerous debates and controversial callers ("I want them to stay mad"), while remaining scrupulously neutral himself. (Others in the emerging medium were not so neutral, such as the Los Angeles host who told a caller, "Lady, I'd like to put a stamp on your nose and mail you to a forest fire.") The development of phone-in talk shows at this time arose not so much from Victor-ian creative inspiration as they did from a more basic instinct -- fear of annihilation. Network radio had lost two-thirds of its listeners to television by 1952, and one 1956 estimate placed radio's remaining prime-time audience at only two-forty-sevenths of what it was in the pre-TV days. As the amount of national advertising spent on radio fell through the floor, local stations, drained of personnel who had fled to the new medium, struggled for ways to stay alive with their own programming. Rigid "formats" began to replace the smorgasbord schedules of the golden age, in the belief that listeners now looked to radio for consistency, not variety. Some stations found their salvation in "top 40" music; others, in talk. The pioneering shows had demonstrated that talk worked, and by the 1960s, the movement became a revolution. KABC in Los Angeles switched to an all-talk format in 1961 and enjoyed a jump in advertising sales; other stations followed nationwide. A 1966 article noted that "radio is making a sensational comeback -- and the reason may be the success of the telephone 'talk shows....They do offer a lively change from the bland output of much of the mass media'" (Mitford, p. 47, 53). The movement accelerated even further on AM radio in the 1970s, as AM's top-40 music audience fled to the stereo and static-free signals of FM. Later, the FCC's repeal of its Fairness Doctrine in 1987 gave even more latitude to the already-freewheeling political talk shows. Nowadays, 80 percent of AM stations incorporate some type of talk-format programming into their schedules. Talk radio, and the variants it developed over the years -- such as sports-talk, shock-talk, hot-talk, shrink-talk, and "topless radio" -- isn't everyone's cup of tea. The medium has a reputation, sometimes deserved, of drawing cranks, extremists, and exhibitionists of all stripes. Prominent hosts such as Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh are as reviled as they are adored. But in terms of economics, it's a five-star success story. Now "firmly established in the mainstream of public discourse," talk radio seems "destined to survive well into the twenty-first century." (Avery, pp. 14-15). And thanks in large part to various kinds of talk formats, some 4,900 AM stations still dot the U.S. radio dial -- three times as many as fifty years ago, when the first predictions were made of radio's demise. On the whole, the AM-radio industry remains solvent today. In the end, call-in talk shows are a testimonial to radio's genius for
adaptability and survival. Of that much, Victor would no doubt be proud.
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