As long as I could remember, we had a radio in our farmhouse. Pa bought his first radio in the 1920s, not long after the first commercial radio station came on the air in 1922. It was a huge instrument, a battery-powered Atwater Kent that required headphones to listen to programs. By the late 1930s, Pa had replaced the Atwater Kent with a Philco table model that stood on a little table in the kitchen, near the cookstove. The Philco required both an A battery and a B battery, which were stacked under the radio and together were nearly half the size of the radio itself.
During winter the radio was my family’s main source of entertainment and information about national and world events. To ensure that we had decent reception, Pa strung a wire from the back of the radio up to the second story through the hole in the ceiling where the dining room stovepipe passed, and then out an upstairs window to the top of our windmill. We had reception all right; we could pick up WTMJ in Milwaukee, of course, but also WGN and WLS in Chicago, a station in Detroit, and on some evenings stations as far east as Pittsburgh.
Until television came along a few years after World War II ended, the radio provided farm folks an important link to the rest of the world. Whereas the party-line telephone connected neighbors and allowed communication among rural towns, the radio brought the world to the farm. With a radio a farm family could enjoy the same programs city people experienced.
As a kid, listening to the radio was a privilege—you didn’t just snap on the radio and twirl the dial to find something of interest. Being allowed to listen to kids’ programs was used as an incentive for doing your late-afternoon chores well and promptly; you wanted to make sure that you were finished by the time your afternoon program came on the air.
We kids had plenty of choices: Jack Armstrong, Sky King, Hopalong Cassidy, The Green Hornet, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, The Lone Ranger, Terry and the Pirates, Tarzan, Captain Midnight, and more. Most programs were fifteen minutes long, and the stories continued from day to day, week to week. When I finished my chores I usually had time to listen to at least two programs before supper.
Tarzan was one of my favorites. The idea of a man living in the jungle and swinging from tree to tree on long vines appealed to my brothers and me, mainly because we could mimic Tarzan by crawling up onto a beam in our barn, grabbing the thick hay-fork rope, and swinging across to the opposite beam, all the while yelling, “Tarzan of the Apps!”—pretty darn close to the real Tarzan’s call of “Tarzan of the apes!”
My second favorite was Captain Midnight. He was one of the good guys, able to solve problems, both domestic and international, with speedy efficiency. Pretty much every red-blooded American boy tried to imitate Captain Midnight, me included. He was brave, resourceful, and clever—and he always won.
Captain Midnight’s sponsor was Ovaltine, a brown concoction that came in a jar and made milk resemble something like chocolate milk. I didn’t like the taste of it, but I dumped it in my milk nonetheless, because in order to receive the complete Captain Midnight story each evening, I would have to decode a message included at the end of each episode. To decode the message, I would need a decoder badge, and to obtain a decoder badge I had to send three Ovaltine labels, along with ten cents, to the Ralston Purina Company at Checkerboard Square, St. Louis, Missouri. I worked hard at drinking my Ovaltine-flavored milk, trying not to let Ma know how much I detested the stuff. Not having a decoder badge had become an embarrassment for me at school, where several of my fellow students spent time every day discussing the secret message they had heard the previous evening.
Finally I finished the second jar of Ovaltine. When Ma bought a third, I stripped the labels off all three and sent them with my dime off to St. Louis. Three days later I began looking for my badge in the mail. Two weeks later I was still looking. At last, when I arrived home from school one afternoon, I saw a little box sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. Knowing how much I was anticipating the badge’s arrival, Ma had put it right where I would see it when I came through the kitchen door.
Quickly I opened the box and found the most beautiful badge I had ever seen. It was shiny gold. A dial on the top could be turned so numbers lined up with letters. It had a pin on the back so I could fasten it to my shirt. Now everyone could see that I had earned my special Captain Midnight badge. Now I could be part of the elite Captain Midnight group that met at recess each day.
I hurried to finish my chores so I could tune in to Captain Midnight. For the first time I would be able to decipher the secret message at the end. Ma didn’t say anything, but I could see that she was grinning as I found paper and pencil and snapped on the Philco. The fifteen-minute program seemed to last forever as I waited for the secret message. First I had to listen to a long spiel about how great Ovaltine was and how healthy it was for those who drank it. At last the announcer said, “Make sure you have paper and pencil ready for the secret message.” He began rattling off a series of numbers, which I quickly wrote down on the slip of paper.
I turned off the radio and turned to my decoder badge. The announcer had explained which numbers to line up with which letters on the badge in order to decipher today’s message. I quickly did so. Then I began decoding. What would it be? What new thing would I learn that only those with decoder badges had the opportunity to see? I was so nervous that my hands shook as I wrote down the letters corresponding to the numbers the announcer had given me.
T-R-O-U-B-L-E A-H-E-A-D
It certainly was not an earth-shaking message. As I learned after a few more evenings of deciphering secret messages, they usually were a briefest-of-brief preview of the next episode—and often abundantly obvious. There was always trouble ahead, that’s what made the program interesting! Even worse, about once a week the secret message turned out to be an advertisement for Ovaltine, which I didn’t appreciate one bit. I hated Ovaltine.
The next time Ma asked me if she should buy more Ovaltine, I replied, “No. Buy Wheaties.” Wheaties sponsored Jack Armstrong, and I was switching my allegiance to “the All American Boy,” which was how Jack Armstrong was described by the program announcer.
In addition to the late-afternoon programs designed especially for the children, our entire family listened to an array of evening programs, including the comedies Amos and Andy, Fred Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Mary Livingston, Red Skelton, Lum and Abner, The Aldrich Family, Edgar Bergin and Charlie McCarthy, The Great Gildersleeve, The Life of Riley, and Fibber McGee and Molly. I loved Fibber and Molly’s famous cluttered closet, with its mounds of stuff that came pouring out whenever the door was opened. I thought everyone must have a closet like that.
We also enjoyed the music shows, such as Kraft Music Hall, Guy Lombardo Show, and Your Hit Parade, and every Saturday night we made sure to tune in the WLS Barn Dance, broadcast from the Eighth Street Theater in downtown Chicago. Our toes tapped to the guitar picking and banjo strumming. The performers—Lulu Belle and Scotty, Red Blanchard (born in Pittsville, Wisconsin), Arkie the Arkansas Woodchopper, Pat Buttram, and many others—were transported to our kitchen on Saturday nights.
We listened to variety shows, too, like Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Major Bowes’ Original Amateur Show. Ma sometimes took in the radio soap operas broadcast during the day, including Ma Perkins, Our Gal Sunday, Stella Dallas, Backstage Wife, and The Romance of Helen Trent (“… because a woman is thirty-five or older, romance in life need not be over”).
On long winter nights we also enjoyed dramas such as The Shadow (“the Shadow knows”), Inner Sanctum with its squeaking door, The FBI in Peace and War, Gang Busters, and Death Valley Days. Pa liked listening to the Friday night fights: Joe Louis and Max Schmelling, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney. One time when our radio battery died on a Friday, Pa walked to Bill Miller’s farm on a below-zero night to listen to the fights on the Millers’ radio.
Pa listened to the weather and farm markets every day at noon, and Pa and Ma listened to the news programs every evening, particularly those hosted by A. V. Kaltenborn (who was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Merrill, Wisconsin), Lowell Thomas, and Gabriel Heatter.
We even listened to the radio at our country school, tuning in to programs broadcast by the University of Wisconsin in Madison on radio station WHA and, for central Wisconsin, WLBL. I especially loved the weekly nature program hosted by Ranger Mac, Professor Wakelin McNeil from the University of Wisconsin College of Agriculture and state 4-H leader. James Schwalbach offered Let’s Draw, helping us make interesting pieces of art at our desks while we listened to Schwalbach’s directions broadcast from a hundred miles away. And Professor Edgar “Pop” Gordon’s show Let’s Sing taught us to appreciate music as we attempted to sing along.
Both at school and at home, the radio entertained us, informed us, and made the winter days more bearable. The old Philco was much more than a source of news and entertainment; it was a member of our family.