Guest Column -- Remembering radio from the 'Golden Days'

By Dick Rossé
Special to the Coastal Point

If you’re under 50, you might as well stop reading now. I’m going to talk about a subject of which you probably know little and care even less.

The subject is Old Time Radio.

See, I was right.

You younger-than-50 folks never knew a time when the radio and not the television set was every family’s prime source of news and entertainment. You would consider it inane (or insane) to have mom, pop and the siblings all gather in the living room for a couple of hours every night, staring at a wooden box that didn’t show pictures.

But inside that box — which often was as beautifully crafted as any piece of fine furniture — miracles were happening. The voices of distinguished-sounding men and elegant-sounding women wafted through the room. They gave us war news reports from London, theater performances from Broadway, great movies from Hollywood.

Even after the advent of television, the radio set continued to reign supreme, at least for a little while.

Watching early TV in our house south of Buffalo was like peering through one of that city’s famous snow storms. And the viewing fare was pretty awful. “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie,” was about as good as it got.

But by the mid-50s, TV had pretty much supplanted radio as the news and information medium of choice. That’s when I had the poor sense of timing to begin my broadcasting career.

In radio!

One night in 1954, I flicked the switch to re-join the ABC network after reading a newscast on our local station. There was silence on the line from New York. Then, the sound of footsteps in a hurry and the out-of-breath voice of an ABC announcer apologizing that there was no program scheduled for that time. He proceeded to ad lib for about 10 minutes until somebody could bring him some recorded music to play.

That’s how little attention people were now paying to radio. Dramatic shows disappeared from the radio networks. The “Evening News” on television became so popular that venerable evening newspapers were quickly becoming extinct.

Somehow, radio news departments were able to survive, but they, too, were hemorrhaging. My timing proved to be excellent at the end of my radio career. A month after my retirement, our entire news network, Mutual, went silent.

There isn’t much left of commercial network radio.

NBC and CBS both belong to the communications leviathan, Viacom. The ABC owner, Walt Disney, has put that network’s stations on the block. A number of years ago, the FCC dropped its requirement for local stations to carry a certain amount of news and public affairs programming, so you really have to search the dial carefully to find a live news report.

Industry experts have concluded that the audience for radio news isn’t big enough to bother with. Rush, Dr. Laura, Paul Harvey and a few other “talk-meisters” draw big audiences, of course, but they’re the only ones keeping radio alive on commercial stations as a news and information source.

Public radio has moved dramatically to fill the news void that’s been created on the commercial airwaves. Indeed, National Public Radio and Public Radio International provide their member stations with wall-to-wall informational programming, much of which can be heard here in Southern Delaware.

Alas, for folks who loved old time radio drama, that genre has entirely disappeared, except for people like Ed Walker who does a show dedicated to radio’s Golden Age on WAMU in Washington. There are several good old time radio sites on the World Wide Web. You might start with OTR.com.

In our area, two groups of radio devotees regularly perform old radio drama with sound effects and commercials just as they were done in the Golden Age. There’s the Ad Hoc Touring Company, a part of the Possum Point Players in Georgetown, and Radio Airwaves Productions in Ocean Pines.

They, and hundreds of groups like them nation-wide, have managed to keep the flame burning.

Soon, though, there won’t be anyone left to remember the Lux Radio Theatre, Suspense or Fibber McGee. Then the sputtering flame will surely die, and a big piece of Americana will die with it.

Dick Rossé is a 36-year veteran of the Mutual and NBC radio networks, and for his final dozen years at NBC served as senior news correspondent in Washington, D.C. He currently resides in Dagsboro.