20 Radio Shows That Had America Hooked Before Television

Few early radio shows were as enormously popular, or as controversial, as Amos ‘n’ Andy. Debuting on radio on March 19, 1928, the nationally broadcast show drew as many as 40 million nightly listeners. Some movie theaters even installed speakers in their auditoriums so patrons wouldn’t miss a program. But the show’s creators, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, were white, and they themselves voiced its Black characters using blackface minstrel dialect. The NAACP protested the show for years, and Black actors were not hired for the roles until the 1951 TV version. Forty million listeners certainly didn’t make it any less problematic!

Little Orphan Annie didn’t originally include decoder rings, the ones made famous by A Christmas Story. It first aired on April 6, 1931, and starting in 1935, kids received metallic lapel pins, mailed in with Ovaltine foil seals. These Radio Orphan Annie Secret Society membership pins were indeed used for deciphering scrambled numbers heard at the end of the late-afternoon Ovaltine-sponsored serial. Decoder rings were later part of separate products.

Kids across the country heard The Lone Ranger but never saw the horse. The show, created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker, debuted January 30, 1933, on WXYZ Detroit with Earle Graser voicing the masked Ranger (Brace Beemer took over the role in 1941), and included Rossini’s William Tell Overture, as well as many hand-crafted sound effects from gun shots to thundering hooves in a chase scene, all performed by the studio crew.

Between 1933 and 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered 30 informal Fireside Chats (but not on a fixed weekly schedule). With up to 60 million Americans tuning in, each broadcast tackled topics including the banking crisis, New Deal policy, and wartime strategy. By speaking directly and in plain language from the living room, bypassing print publishers, he transformed what it meant to speak to the country as president.

Fibber McGee and Molly debuted on April 16, 1935, and starred real-life married couple Jim Jordan and Marian Jordan. One of its most famous running gags involved an extremely overstuffed hall closet. Whenever Fibber opened the closet in their home at 79 Wistful Vista, a barrage of household items would come crashing out with elaborate sound effects, always concluding with a tinkling tin can. The gag’s success depended on the writers not using it every week because great writing means you had to resist overusing your best joke!

Jack Benny’s own radio show premiered on May 2, 1932, bringing his stage persona to a national audience for the first time. His character was cheap, vain, and eternally 39. His comic equal on the radio was Eddie Anderson, who played Rochester and often outshone Benny in their on-air exchanges. Benny’s famously cheap persona produced one of his best-known radio jokes during the March 28, 1948 broadcast. A mugger told Benny to hand over his money or his life, and Benny responded with a long pause, as if he genuinely needed time to decide. Even with his life on the line, Benny still had to think about the money!

Small-town listeners needed no ticket to hear a hit film retold on Monday night on the Lux Radio Theatre. From its first broadcast on October 14, 1934, each hour-long program featured complete orchestral accompaniment and live performances as film stars such as Clark Gable, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart revisited their screen roles. The show was hosted by film director Cecil B. DeMille from 1936 to 1945. (He didn’t create it, though.)

Edgar Bergen, whose career was built on working the mouth of his wooden dummy, made the somewhat improbable (but not without success, mind you) transition to radio. Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy started on May 9, 1937, on The Chase and Sanborn Hour, and on Sundays, as many as 35 million people listened to Bergen’s amazing voice and McCarthy’s smart-mouthed lines.

George Burns and Gracie Allen built their radio comedy around the contrast between Allen’s surreal logic and Burns’s calm demeanor as the straight man. When their show started on February 15, 1932, it eventually reached audiences of up to 45 million listeners every week. A popular legend states that Allen would end the show with the catchphrase, “Goodnight, Gracie.” But Burns wrote in his memoir that his prompt, “Say goodnight, Gracie,” was answered with only the word, “Goodnight.” The famous catchphrase was apparently never uttered at all. Talk about putting words in someone’s mouth!

Lights Out was a radio series that was initially created in 1934 by Wyllis Cooper and expanded in 1936 by Arch Oboler. Airing at midnight, the show featured gory sound effects created by crushed bacon, rubbed rubber gloves, and raw pasta. The most popular of the programs was an episode called “Chicken Heart” about an amoebic heart that was expanding and engulfing whole cities. Unfortunately, no 1930s versions of the program survive; the only version available is Oboler’s 1964 re-creation.

On September 26, 1937, The Shadow premiered, the radio drama whose mysterious hero had the power to “cloud men’s minds.” Orson Welles, 22 at the time, would play Lamont Cranston. Trivia time: The sinister laugh that introduced the character, paired with Saint-Saëns’s Omphale’s Spinning Wheel, was actually performed by actor Frank Readick in earlier promotional broadcasts and not by Welles.

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air troupe broadcast a dramatization of The War of the Worlds. Presented as a series of fake news reports interrupting scheduled dance music broadcasts, the show frightened radio listeners who had tuned in too late to pick up context clues as to what the show really was. Panicked callers swamped police phone lines. But millions of people didn’t flee onto the streets. Newspapers, threatened by radio as a competitor for advertising dollars, reported panics everywhere.

The Adventures of Superman, starring Bud Collyer, first aired on February 12, 1940. In 1946, Superman took on a very real enemy: the Ku Klux Klan. The show’s 16-part arc “Clan of the Fiery Cross” aired between June 10 and July 1 and was done in collaboration with activist Stetson Kennedy, who provided information about rituals and passwords used by the Klan. Kennedy took some dramatic license in the retelling, but the Klan was embarrassed, and its recruitment suffered. Imagine getting your secret passwords exposed by Superman on national radio!

The Guiding Light holds the distinction of the longest continuous story in broadcast history. Irna Phillips created this serial focusing on the Reverend John Ruthledge of a Midwestern town. Procter & Gamble sponsored this 15-minute drama daily beginning on NBC on January 25, 1937. It continued airing on radio uninterrupted until 1956 and even expanded onto television!

Radio got its first true spin-off when NBC and sponsor Kraft Foods gave Harold Peary, who played the loud and blustery neighbor Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve on Fibber McGee and Molly, his own series. In it, the Gildersleeve character was toned down into a lovable bachelor uncle to an orphaned niece and nephew living in the town of Summerfield. The Great Gildersleeve debuted on August 31, 1941, and ran for sixteen years.

Suspense was a radio thriller series built around exactly what the name promises: keeping listeners on edge. The show debuted on June 17, 1942, on CBS and frequently featured music from Bernard Herrmann. Its benchmark episode is the aptly titled “Sorry, Wrong Number,” written by Lucille Fletcher and featuring Agnes Moorehead as a bedridden invalid who listens, via a crossed wire, to a plot to murder her. It remains an exemplar of fear without monsters. It builds dread from a telephone line and a victim, not just a mere crime in progress.

You Bet Your Life, starring Groucho Marx, premiered on October 27, 1947, and did something unusual for radio comedy at the time: it was recorded on magnetic tape before airing instead of simply going out live. When someone said the secret word, a mechanical duck descended and dropped $100. The producers edited the many hours of Groucho’s ad-libbed conversations with contestants to keep only the funniest lines. Gone was dead air. Editing had entered radio comedy with You Bet Your Life. Basically, they figured out the “cut out the boring parts” formula early!

Dragnet first aired on June 3, 1949, on NBC. Created by and starring Jack Webb, who used case files from the LAPD, the drama focused on procedure rather than on melodrama. Although it’s been widely misremembered, Webb’s line was actually “All we want are the facts, ma’am.” The “Just the facts, ma’am” line came from a 1953 parody record by Stan Freberg. Walter Schumann’s four-note theme became instantly recognizable.

On April 26, 1952, CBS introduced its new “adult Western,” Gunsmoke, starring deep-voiced actor William Conrad as Marshal Matt Dillon. A mat was placed on the studio floor to create realistic footsteps, while other effects simulated gunshots. In 1955, CBS started a TV version of Gunsmoke, with James Arness visually portraying Matt Dillon. For six years, the show had two different actors playing Matt Dillon. Conrad continued on in the radio show until 1961.

The CBS Radio show Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, which ran from 1949 to 1962, broadcast its final episode at 6:35 PM EST on September 30, 1962. In the same hour came the last Suspense. September 30, 1962, is regarded by many historians as the true end of radio’s Golden Age. Bob Bailey, the actor most associated with the role during its mid-1950s peak, voiced the insurance investigator who itemizes his expense account for each case.

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