Radio celebrated women journalists in fact and fiction

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Bob Stepno

Happy International Women’s Day…
First, here’s a dramatized version of a real woman reporter covering a real crime story — with a young woman criminal for good measure. Farther down the page, you will find links to other radio programs about more historic — and heroic — women journalists.

The reporter, portrayed by actress Janet Fox, is Dorothy Kilgallen, then of the New York Evening Journal, later of Hearst’s Journal-American and national syndication as a Broadway gossip columnist. In this early incarnation as a crime reporter — probably a decade before the 1947 broadcast — she is interviewing “The Bobby Sox Kid from Bayonne.”

The episode is from the long-running radio series, “The Big Story,” as preserved at the Internet Archive. Its portrayal of a woman reporter at work may be true, but certainly fits the stereotypes of the day — sending a woman to get a 17-year-old suspect to talk by loaning her a compact to powder her nose.

“I just might come up with something, you know, ‘just between us girls,'” she tells the police.

As a “procedural,” the reporter’s manipulative interview with the teenager might be worth discussing in a “reporting techniques” or ethics class, but a lot of the dialogue is hard to take with a straight face — even before the line, “I’m just wacky about mayonnaise!” (Or the revelation that “Temptation” is the teenage murderer’s favorite song.)

In the 1930s Kilgallen had repeated Nellie Bly’s round-the-world stunt and wrote a book about it, but “The Big Story” was more interested in crime reports. By the time of this broadcast, Kilgallen had gone on to be a famous columnist and co-host of the married-couple-chat radio show, “Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick.” In the ’50s she would add TV panel-show celebrity to her credentials.

Ironically, while she was once known as “America’s most famous crime reporter,” Kilgallen’s own death resulted in articles, books and an ongoing “Kilgallen Files” blog — after her stories on the death of President Kennedy and related conspiracy theories.

“The Big Story” on radio and TV feature awarded a cash prize to the journalist whose report — usually involving a sensational crime investigation — was chosen for broadcast that week. Real reporters’ names were used, but other names and details were changed to create the radio drama.

Kilgallen’s “Big Story” episode may not be the highest point in radio or journalism history, but it gives me something fresh to head the list below — a recap of the old-time-radio programs I’ve found that profiled or starred historical or fictional women reporters, editors and publishers. There are more to come!

Newspaper and magazine women in radio stories

Historical profiles — dramatized by DuPont Cavalcade of America:

  • Nellie Bly (1864-1922) — “Nellie has journalism by the throat and shakes until it cries for mercy.”
  • Louisa Knapp Curtis (1851-1910) — from a newspaper women’s page to a magazine empire
  • Abigail Scott Duniway — (1834-1915) newspaper-publishing suffragist
  • Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) — author, editor, foreign correspondent
  • Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879) — magazine editor, advocate of education for women
  • Anne Newport Royall (1769-1854) — Washington gadfly and “godmother of muckraking”
  • Anna Zenger (1717-1786) — from a book subtitled, “Mother of Freedom”

Women in radio’s newspaper fictions:

  • Hildy Johnson — the only good reporter in “His Girl Friday”
  • Sabra Cravatt— fictional Oklahoma pioneer editor and congresswoman from “Cimarron”
  • Lois Lane — who hardly needs an introduction
  • Lorelei Kilbourne — straightening out her scandal-monger editor at the “Big Town” Illustrated Press
  • Lenore Case — publisher’s secretary and sometime reporter, first to see some good behind the mask of the Green Hornet
  • Ann Williams — pencil-press reporter accomplice of “Casey, Crime Photographer”
  • Betty Drake — co-owner of The Trumpet, radio soap opera’s first lady of crusading journalism
  • C.J. Griffith and the Eager twins — young women who stirred things up at Will Rogers Jr.’s Gazette
  • Liz Lane — feature writer, the “Christmas in Connecticut” answer to Martha Stewart.
  • Susan Armstrong — editor and publisher of the Morning Star in “the gay new exciting comedy adventure, Bright Star”
  • Kit Gaynor — a “Woman of the Year” style international journalist who steals the hero’s heart in a “Night Beat” episode, “The Old Itch” or “Stone’s Love Affair”

For more background on some of the real women journalists mentioned above — and many more, see the National Women’s History Museum site, Women with a deadline: Female printers, publishers and journalists from the colonial period to World War I.

Posted in 1930s, 1940s, 19th century, cavalcade, Hearst, Hildy Johnson, historical figures, Lois Lane, women | Leave a comment

Newspapers as Madness: Is Bob Ready to Take Control?

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Bob Stepno

“You wouldn’t have made a bad detective, either of you”
— ex-police chief to editors Betty & Bob


In last week’s eighth episode in our 16-part “Betty and Bob” story, crusading editor and publisher Bob Drake hired a former police chief as an investigative reporter, then threatened to risk a nervous breakdown by getting back into harness himself too soon after a serious illness. At least that’s what his wife thinks.

Now, if you fast-forward past the two-minute musical intro, Bob Is Ready to Take Control starts with a recap that puts his mental state in perspective. So does this conversation between Betty and her friend Claire, widow of a star reporter who was killed in the line of duty.

Betty: “All the rotten things we fought to get rid of in Monroe… are moving right in again, and Bob wants to go back and get into the thick of the fight.”
Claire: “I guess he can’t help wanting that. It’s the kind of man he is. I think that’s what Hal used to admire in him so much.”

When “Betty & Bob” was first broadcast in the 1930s, Radio may have been competing with newspapers for advertisers’ dollars and the audience’s time, but soap opera script writers — often former reporters themselves — clearly had no qualms about showing newspaper people as idealists. The Drakes are in the business to work for the public’s interest, even at the risk of their health and domestic bliss.

At least some newspaper publishers in radioland are like that. Near the end of this episode, a Mr. Newton appears, an agent for another kind of publisher — “Walter Humboldt,” owner of the big paper in the state capital — offering the Drakes $250,000 over what they paid for their newspaper. He casts little doubt that Humboldt is in league with the corrupt politicians the Drakes had been fighting back in Monroe, before Bob’s illness made them consider selling.

Bob: “What would Humboldt do with The Trumpet?”
Mr. Newton: “That’s a fine question! Whatever he pleased with it… What’s wrong with that?”

Later, Bob sums up:

“I’d be crazy to let Humboldt and his type of journalism take over The Trumpet.”

To find out what kind of journalism that is, and how it compares to the crusading Trumpet, you’ll just have to listen to the program… or come back next week for a new summary.

For more background, here’s my soap-opera overview page, and the earlier “Betty & Bob” episodes: 8th & 7th, 6th & 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd, 1st.

I’m still waiting for the Drakes to consider joining forces with Britt Reid or Clark Kent.

Posted in 1930s, editors, journalism, newspaper crusades, political corruption, publishers, radio, soap opera | Leave a comment

What’s a ‘batch-i-naylian orgy’? Ask Abby

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Bob Stepno
Oregon Historical Society's picture of Abigail Scott Duniway's typewriter

Editor Abigail Scott Duniway's typewriter is preserved at the Oregon Historical Society.

About half-way through this Cavalcade of America radio profile, a libelous attack on suffragist newspaper publisher Abigail Scott Duniway sends her off to the dictionary to find out more about the lies a competing newspaper has been telling about her.

When she gets home, she discovers that her five sons have already seen the same editorial attacking their mother, and they have a new question for her: “How good are you at raising bail, Ma?”

She was apparently as good at raising bail as she was at raising hell, according to her dramatic profile in this 1945 Cavalcade episode, Westward the Women, presented here in honor of Women’s History Month.

In the 1870s, Duniway was editor and publisher of the Oregon newspaper The New Northwest.  She also wrote her life story, Path Breaking, numerous novels (sometimes serialized in her newspaper) and poetry. Although she died in 1915, before final ratification of the vote for women, she lived to see Oregon became the seventh state to pass a women’s suffrage amendment, and wrote the Oregon Woman Suffrage Proclamation in 1912.

This radio biography is based on the book Westward the Women by Nancy Wilson Ross — no relation to a similarly named Hollywood film about a wagon train full of mail-order brides.  Duniway is portrayed by Broadway and Hollywood star Ann Harding as a tough-talking pioneer businesswoman and organizer whose talents more than made up for her devoted husband’s business shortcomings and a later injury that put him in a wheelchair. As a storekeeper, she deals with the economic realities of women’s lives in an era when they couldn’t own property of their own.

Her husband, Ben Duniway, narrates much of the story, including an announcement to his cronies who question her “gallivanting around”:

“I like a woman with gumption and ideas. Why you know what she’s going to do now, and she thought of it all herself? … She’s going to publish a newspaper, yessir. Going to be a publisher. It’s going to be hard for  folks to swallow, but I’ll bet it’s going to be a good newspaper.”

For more about Duniway’s life and times, listen to the program, then see her page at the Oregon Historical Society and the Oregon Encylopedia. Her newspaper, The New Northwest, is available for free online in The Oregon Digital Newspaper Program.

The Oregon publisher is among the women journalists I had not encountered in my “media history” studies until I started digging into online collections of radio programs.  I’d been impressed by the number of reporters and editors who popped up in dramatic series, then discovered that real-life reporters, editors and publishers had their working lives dramatized in a number of radio history series, most notably the DuPont Cavalcade of America.

Cavalcade was a long-running a public relations campaign by DuPont to lift its image through association with “the forward march of the American spirit” — tales of great Americans in government, public life, arts and letters. A generation before PBS or the History Channel, Cavalcade of America provided intriguing popular-history profiles, and plenty of them: The weekly program ran from 1935 to 1953.

Among other women journalists on Cavalcade are these I’ve already mentioned here:

The Cavalcade series has been researched in depth by radio historian Martin Grams Jr. and has been catalogued and uploaded to the Internet Archive by the Old Time Radio Researchers Group.

Posted in 1940s, 19th century, cavalcade, editors, historical figures, true stories, women | Leave a comment

Spring Break Superman Double Double-Feature

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Bob Stepno

This week, four episodes of “Professor Thorpe’s Bathysphere,” transported from the fall of 1940 for your March 2012 spring-break entertainment.

5: Sept. 4, 1940 6: Sept. 6, 1940
7: Sept. 9, 1940 8: Sept. 11, 1940

On the radio, America’s Kryptonian visitor took his newspaper role so seriously that journalistic assignments often framed his “super” adventures, not the other way around — which was more often the case in his feature film incarnations. However, this week’s episodes have more heroism than journalism, just to move the story along, now that the reporting-frame has been established.

The tale whose 12-minute episodes we’re podcasting, “Professor Thorpe’s Bathysphere,” is from Superman’s first year on the air, just a year after the launch of the comic book and newspaper-strip character. There was no heroic task involved in Clark Kent’s “finding the story”; in the opening episode we heard the feature assignment handed down by editor Perry White. The news values involved were as old as Nellie Bly’s trip around the world or Stanley finding Livingstone: The adventure of scientific exploration and the possibility of some new record or discovery.

But there was also some deception involved, if not enough to call for a journalism ethics investigation. Kent’s editor said his scientist acquaintance was testing a new diving-bell and investigating deep-sea life in the interest of scientific knowledge. Later in the story we get a hint that White knew the expedition was literally a treasure hunt. He certainly knows enough by episode eight to send another reporter, one who knows the real quest, to find out whether an emergency rescue is necessary.

In any case, Kent didn’t seem to resent the deception when Professor Thorpe broke the news at the end of episode three. Perhaps the alien visitor’s own agenda — curiosity about human beings and this new planet, plus a need to be of assistance — is close enough to the motives of the average journalist. Even the treasure hunt is to finance the professor’s research, as he says, “for the betterment of mankind.”

(Previous installments of this story: first and second, third and fourth. Earlier podcasts: Origin stories. )

Either way, it’s a story, and — unlike the comic book and movie versions of Superman — this radio hero with the dual identity is a reporter first. The newspaper story leads to the need for Superman’s derring-do, whether it’s a battle with pirates, a wrestling match with a giant octopus, or fight with an anchor chain to keep hurricane winds from putting a ship on the rocks and endangering the scientist and diver Gleason below.

That’s where we pick up the story today, with four fast-moving episodes that finally let actor Bud Collyer drop his voice to its lowest “This is a job for… Superman” register, even when he’s describing his own actions underwater. (Each episode can be downloaded from the Internet Archive using the links on the dates above, if media-player icons are not visible.)

As is usually the case in radio, the special effects are as good as your imagination. For all the action, start from the beginning of episode five. You’ll discover that this early incarnation of Superman, unlike the later cinematic incarnations, can’t survive without air to breathe. If you are queasy about hearing giant sea creatures dismembered, or would rather get back to Kent’s journalism, skip to episode seven or eight and trust to the daily radio-serial’s essential “recap” at the beginning of the episode to catch you up on just enough of the missed action.

By the end of episode seven, Collyer is back in his tenor range, and Kent is “back from his cabin” protecting the existence of his secret identity behind innocent reportorial questions, like: “Professor Thorpe, Gleason! You’ve been saved! How did it happen?!”

In episode eight we meet two more members of The Daily Planet staff — copy boy Jimmy Olsen and reporter Bill Wentworth, sent to the Caribbean by White to find out what has become of Kent and the professor. (A sea-going voyage apparently was no place for a woman — not even Lois Lane; either that, or the series hadn’t settled on an actress to play the part regularly.)

Note: This series does show one sign of its 1940 origin, the casual reference to one of the pirates as “a half-breed,” which along with the frequent World War II use of “Japs” are about as racially offensive as Superman gets. In fact, in the late 1940s, the series staged an impressive campaign for brotherhood and against discrimination, including a story in which Perry White and The Daily Planet took on the Ku Klux Klan.

Posted in 1940s, adventure, Clark Kent, journalism, newspaper stunts, newspapers, Perry White, reporters, science reporting, Superman | Leave a comment

Will police chief trade his badge for a press card?

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Bob Stepno

“I never knew there was so much rottenness and corruption in Monroe until you and Betty and The Trumpet began to dig it up and tried to get rid of it” — police chief.


“Ex-Police Chief Henderson Visits,” the seventh episode in our 16-part “Betty and Bob” story, makes it clear what kind of newspaper owners the Drakes are. (As usual, you can fast-forward past the opening two minutes of music — the place-holder for a commercial when this classic 12-minutes-daily series was replayed in syndication in 1947.)

As “editors and publishers of Monroe’s crusading newspaper, The Trumpet,” the announcer tells us, the Drakes didn’t always agree with the chief, but they respected him. Henderson not only helped The Trumpet clean up a gambling racket, he saved Betty’s life once when a gangster was about to kill her.

The chief, who has just quit his job, hops a train to the Drakes’ country home to bring them up to date on troubling developments back in the city during the weeks that Bob has been recovering from that soap-opera cliche, a miracle operation that restored his ability to walk.

Betty tries to convince Bob he needs to rest for a couple more months, but he’s impatient to get back to work. He definitely seems to need his wife’s good-natured teasing to keep his impulsiveness in check. (Husbands in fragile physical or mental health — and wives who pull them through — may have been soap-opera themes that “Betty & Bob” helped pioneer in the 1930s. The “husband-and-wife newspaper publishers” angle during this phase of the serial was something all their own.)

With Henderson’s visit, Bob is energized by the news that both the chief and the city manager were somehow tricked into resigning — possibly by criminal influences on the City Council.

“When you folks left Monroe,” Henderson tells the Drakes, “it was a signal for crime and corruption to move right back in.”

That sets the stage for the next episode. (If you missed the earlier ones, here they are: 6th & 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd, 1st.)

In the episode Corruption in City Government,” the chief tells the Drakes the new city manager is a former economics professor who seems easily manipulated. He also has a beautiful, but strangely disturbed, daughter who could bear watching.

The news about the city leadership is enough to convince Bob to announce that he will get back to running the newspaper in person as soon as he is able, completely cancelling the idea of selling the paper. He even orders up a page-one box announcing that “rumors that The Trumpet is for sale are entirely erroneous.”

With Betty insisting that he still needs rest, Bob comes up with a compromise — he offers the former police chief a job as a special investigative reporter and gets right on the phone to the managing editor to tell him the news.

“I’m convinced that something rotten is happening in Monroe,” Bob Drake tells the managing editor. “And I want The Trumpet to bear down and find out what it is and who’s in back of it.”

This is the series’ second anecdote about how someone got their start on a newspaper, a common scene in dramatic portayals of journalists — although few appear to take a standard path to the newsroom. The Drakes’ earlier account described a young reporter who hitchhiked across country when he heard of their plans for a progressive, crusading paper.

“One thing I’ve got to say about the Drakes, when they move, they move awful fast,” Henderson says, after accepting the job offer. The chief admits he is a little bewildered, but pleased and excited:

“Gosh… As a matter of fact, I think I’ll be of even more value working for The Trumpet than I was as chief of police.”

Radio dramas often slipped newspaper reporters into a crime-busting detective role — from “Big Town” to “Crime Photographer,” with the heroes punching more bad guys than typewriter keys — but this is the first case I’ve seen where a police chief joins the newspaper staff, as well as a story where the forces of evil are more subtle and pervasive.

So far, at least, the Drakes and Henderson haven’t hinted at donning green masks or red capes like those other old-time-radio journalist heroes, Britt Reid and Clark Kent.

Posted in 1930s, newspaper crusades, political corruption, publishers, radio, reporters, soap opera | Leave a comment

Radio’s Clark Kent showed “star reporter” qualities

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Bob Stepno

The 1940 Superman radio adventure of Professor Thorpe’s Bathysphere finds reporter Clark Kent hiding not only his secret identity, but the very existence of Superman. Superman episodes at JHeroes.comIn the process, unlike some comic and TV representations of the character, this Clark is a better role model for reporters: A smart and resourceful sleuth, willing to appear brave or take chances despite the “mild” adjective the announcer used to describe him at the start of the program.

He’s a reporter off on assignment who has fallen into a dangerous situation, and the people around him look to him for ideas and leadership — not for super-powers.

Like a lot of fictional reporters, he has a few too many abilities to be easily believed. We’ve already seen that he know how to fly an airplane. In this third of a dozen 12-minute episodes in the story, he announces that he’s also a capable deep-sea diver, but maybe that’s just a bluff.

Still, none of the other characters seems surprised that a reporter can do these things. Were kids tuning in to hear Superman in the 1940s getting another fantastic — but closer to reality — role model for future careers? Were readers getting some amazing expectations concerning the people knocking out their hometown Daily Miracle? Were reporters and editors getting their egos inflated?

In a way, the requirements of radio may make Kent appear a better newspaperman than Superman comic books and movies did. On the radio, with no visuals to help tell the story, journalist characters had to work harder at being storytellers — they conducted interviews, asked follow-up questions, and described scenes as they developed.

The announcer routinely identifies Kent as the paper’s “star reporter,” which is impressive, considering that this August, 1940, episode is only six months after the character walked into the Daily Planet newsroom for the first time. (Here’s my podcast item about Clark Kent’s radio origin.)

“It wasn’t as difficult as it sounds.” — typical response from Clark Kent, after the resourceful reporter appears to do things that would take a Superman. 

The bathysphere adventure began last week when editor Perry White introduced Kent to a scientist who has invented a new deep-sea exploration vehicle, supposedly for ichthyological research.  In this one, we find out it’s more than that — a fortune in gold. No wonder pirates are after the scientist and his ship!

The Internet Archive has several pages of the series, The Adventures of Superman, which was broadcast daily for more than a decade. That page includes the full 12-part bathysphere adventure, which I started posting here with last weekend’s two episodes.

In today’s second episode, Part IV of Professor Thorpe’s Bathysphere… Kent learns why their destination is called “Octopus Bay…” He also invokes the name of editor Perry White — and his story expectations — to convince the scientist to let the courageous Kent join the bathysphere crew for a descent to the bottom of the sea.

Even at the bottom of the sea, Kent moves along the audio-only narrative by being a good reporter, full of questions for the professor as a diver leaves the diving-bell: “Professor, would you mind explaining how that safety chamber works? … Didn’t the water rush into the chamber when he opened the outer door?” Unfortunately, Kent’s curiosity may distract both of them from the oxygen-level gauge in their control-room.

(Toward the end of this episode, we also find out that 1940’s Superman didn’t have quite the strength and invulnerability of the versions of the character in later decades.)

Footnote: Come to think of it, Professor Thorpe isn’t the first professor or scientist Clark Kent has met. The first humans he encountered — after arriving on Earth fully-grown, a departure from the later “childhood in Smallville” storyline in the comics — were a professor and his son, and the first story he worked on with Lois Lane was another scientist-profile, one that she wasn’t very excited about.

Note: if an obvious advertisement or more subtle YouTube video ad appears below this line, it is something I have no control over: It is posted by WordPress.com in exchange for letting me keep this blog on the company’s Web server.

Posted in 1940s, Clark Kent, newspapers, Perry White, reporters, Superman | Leave a comment

Emotional woes and courage of a newspaper family

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Bob Stepno

“Bad enough to give up something that’s meant your whole life, running a newspaper, but when I can’t even get a copy of it to read!” — Bob Drake, publisher

No wonder publisher Bob Drake has a temper tantrum when his morning newspaper isn’t delivered. He’s moved out to the country town of Walton to recover from the miracle operation that gave him back the use of his legs, but he still expects his Monroe Trumpet in time for breakfast. Corruption may be afoot!

In this fifth episode of our serial (4th, 3rd, 2nd, 1st), the angry newspaperman fires off a long distance phone call to the managing editor — serious business back in the 1930s — and you can hear his blood pressure rise when the switchboard operator doesn’t recognize his name immediately.

His wife (and co-publisher) Betty laughs and teases him constantly from the background (“Oh darling… I think you’re ridiculous”), enough to suggest that his histrionics are at least slightly theatrical. But when the conversation with the managing editor turns serious, so does she.

The news is that both the police chief and the city manager in Monroe have resigned — major news that Bob has been missing, and he’s only been on his rest-cure for a couple of days!

“He wasn’t the brightest chief of police in the world, but he was an honest man,” Drake says, perhaps foreshadowing something we’ll find out soon.

Alas, this week’s JHeroes selection from the Archive.org Betty & Bob collection spends so much time recapping the plot and re-establishing the characters that I’ll add a second episode below. The summaries — along with the two minutes of “commercial would go hear” syrupy music — eat about half of this one, so feel free to fast-forward. More time goes to a sub-plot about a possible romance between Claire, the widow of a murdered star reporter, and Chet, the courageous local schoolteacher. In fact, the episode’s filename is Chet is falling for Claire. (Chet and the Drakes bravely saved a neighbor from an angry mob on their first “peaceful” day back in the country.)

Reporter murdered

This next episode, Betty tells Chet about Claire’s Situation, includes an element familiar in many “newspaper movies” and radio series — a “how the reporter got his job” scene. The reporter in this case is Hal Evans, Claire’s late husband, and Betty tells how the idealistic young writer hitchhiked cross-country when he heard the Drakes were taking over The Trumpet.  

She follows up with the story about the investigative reporting project that led to Hal’s apparent murder by racketeers, and she makes clear his pretty young widow’s current “situation.” Of course she’s pregnant. “Betty and Bob” was, after all, a daily soap opera — a pioneer in what became traditional soap themes of romance, emotional trauma, family, divorce, mysterious evil-doers, bravery, malicious gossip, fragile physical or mental health, and — of course — a determination to keep on going, day after day.

For all its campiness, “Betty & Bob” is here because it added plenty of “newspaper drama” themes to the suds — dedication to a newspaper (sometimes devastating to personal relationships), journalism as a career for women, civic spirit and citizens’ respect for newspapers, investigative work, political crusades, muckraking, reform, and sometimes a bit of cynical frustration about “the system.” (The sort of thing that drove Britt Reid to become The Green Hornet.)

By the end of this episode, for instance, a telegram makes it pretty clear that suspicions of renewed political corruption back in Monroe are going to draw Bob and Betty back to The Trumpet a lot sooner than his “rest cure” doctor anticipated.

Posted in 1930s, 1940s, editors, journalism, publishers, romance, soap opera, women | Leave a comment

Spring Saturdays with Superman

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Bob Stepno

The 1940 Superman radio adventure of Professor Thorpe’s Bathysphere begins with Clark Kent being called to editor Perry White’s office to get his new assignment — covering a scientific discovery. Superman episodes at JHeroes.com

No Earth-destroying calamity is approaching from outer space; no mad scientist is threatening civilization; no shout of “This is a job for… Superman!” sets things in motion. Like many of the early adventures of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, this one begins simply with a reporter going off on assignment.

“Do you know anything about icthyology?” editor Perry White asks Kent, introducing him to a scientist who has invented a new deep-sea exploration bathysphere.

From there, of course, the excitement builds in a hurry. In the first 10 minutes, there’s a mysterious report of a stolen ship, cannon fire, possible piracy, a rescue at sea and a need for that blue-and-red uniform. But I’m always impressed that there’s some “newspaper journalism” getting the ball rolling in these early Superman episodes — more than I remember seeing in Superman movies or comic books as I was growing up.

Yes, it’s a “juvenile adventure” designed to sell breakfast cereal. But that’s part of the reason I’m interested. For young listeners to the 1940-1951 radio series, the message may have been that reporters — not just superheroes — are “the good guys” who meet interesting people, go to exotic places, confront wrong-doers, solve mysteries, and tell the story to the world.

Since I’ve been able to keep up with podcasting “Betty & Bob” soap opera episodes on Wednesdays, I’ve decided to add a real “cereal serial” for the weekend. Originally sponsored by Kelloggs Pep, the official name is The Adventures of Superman. You can follow that link to the Internet Archive page with all the Bathysphere episodes if you’re impatient, or wait for me to add a few comments each weekend. The dozen 15-minute segments, originally broadcast daily, would take most of the semester on a one-a-week basis, so I’ll double up — with one at the top of this page and one at the bottom.

I posted other samples of Daily Planet staff adventures last year, starting with the radio version of Superman’s origin and his first encounter with the very competitive Lois Lane (See Clark, Lois & Perry White Episodes at JHeroes.com), but I haven’t tried a whole continuing story. This Bathysphere tale was originally broadcast in August and September, 1940, about eight months after the start of the series.

The point I want to make is that this early version of Superman used Daily Planet reporters, Clark and Lois, as the center of the adventures. Lois wasn’t always the reporter, or “damsel in distress” either. Clark’s assignments became Superman’s adventures, not the other way around. Being the reporter was the gateway to excitement, “Man of Steel” or not.

In addition, in this episode we learn that The Daily Planet has its own seaplane ready and waiting for its reporters’ adventures… and that Clark can pilot the plane as well as he can fly in blue tights and red cape. Looks like we’ll have to expand the journalism school curriculum again…

Here’s Part II of Professor Thorpe’s Bathysphere…


The reporter and scientist work together to investigate a mysterious prisoner onboard a stolen ship, a case of impersonation, and a good possibility of piracy. It would help if all reporters had Kent’s super hearing and could twist a steel door off its hinges to get at information. (But would it be ethical?)

Note: if an obvious advertisement or more subtle YouTube video ad appears below this line, it is something I have no control over: It is posted by WordPress.com in exchange for letting me keep this blog on the company’s Web server.

Posted in 1930s, 1940s, Clark Kent, Perry White, Superman | 4 Comments

Journalists make good neighbors

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Bob Stepno

This week’s “Betty and Bob” episode, Anita Rusack escapes from her father, finds the journalist couple providing a refuge — and sandwiches — for the young daughter of their neighbor, who apparently went mad after the death of his wife. Hear all about it, in just a dozen minutes or so of vintage radio soap opera.

Next thing you know, they’ll be volunteering to talk-down the armed man.

While it provides plenty of tradional soap opera pathos, this episode doesn’t get the Drakes back to their big city newsroom. That will have to wait until Betty decides whether confronting shotgun-wielding neighbors is the kind of “rest” Bob came to the countryside to get, after the “miracle operation” mentioned a couple of episodes back.

He and Betty and their new friend Chet — a local schoolteacher — have already faced down an angry mob that wanted to lynch the neighbor. If you wonder what any of this has to do with journalism — other than establishing the Drakes as courageous public servants — stay tuned. That means either come back next Wednesday, or use iTunes to subscribe to this page’s RSS feed as a JHeroes.com podcast. (You’ll also get any other shows I add to this blog during the week.)

Past episodes:
4. Journalists make good neighbors (this page)
3. Could there be a newsroom romance brewing?
2. ‘There’s Murder in the Air Tonight…’
1. Another journalist named Bob

Reminder: Each episode starts with a couple of minutes of “filler” music that you can fast-forward past. When broadcast, it would have been replaced by a radio commercial.

In fact, although “Betty & Bob” was a 1930s pioneer in the genre that came to be called “soap opera,” I think its original sponsor was General Mills.

“Bisquick opera” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. But this transcribed re-release of the program may have had soap among a variety of sponsors when it was rebroadcast in syndication a decade or so after its original airing. The archive.org audio files are dated 1947, presumably from the transcription disc labels, but later episodes have hints that this storyline was first broadcast in the late 1930s.

Some oldtime radio fan (more than one, I suspect) has observed that if the shows had been sponsored by breakfast-food companies, we might call them “cereal serials.”

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What am I doing here?

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Bob Stepno

I tried to answer that question on the “about” pages at the top of  this blog, but getting an email from someone who has put even more creative energy into old time radio research inspired me to try again.

Here’s the interview at OTRBuffett… And, no, I haven’t been on the Internet quite as long as Jim suggests, although I did publish an article or two about it in Soundings magazine more than 20 years ago, back in the pre-Web “Usenet” days.

From the look of his many blogs, Jimbo Mason has been into old time radio much longer than I have. His clipping-index to radio show articles in Google’s scanned Billboard magazines and newspapers is amazing. I wrote to ask whether he was using some special software to compile those lists. Nope, just hundreds of hours of work, he said.

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