A Pictorial History Of Radio – Irving Settel, 1967 [Second Edition] ★

Something in the Air

Mass media may seem a dominant part of our culture now, yet it is a relatively recent flutter in civilization’s long march, and for much of the time it has been around, not all that dominant. Centuries after the invention of the printing press, after all, most people still couldn’t read.

Getting around that roadblock, not to mention others like distance and cost, happened only with the advent of radio. Today it may strike us as a quaint, old-fashioned device, but it can be said that it was the invention most responsible for American society as we know it today.

In this book, Irving Settel explains how radio went from little more than a novelty by the end of World War I to sweep the country mere months later, fueled by the prosperity of the Jazz Age:

The impact of radio in this country was so great that it had become one of the most influential forces in American life, stimulating every phase of activity. New stars were born, new expressions were popularized as new program formats were being offered. Radio was penetrating every third home in the country, and tenement house roofs were covered with forests of antennae.

It really used to be like this...well, maybe they didn't dress like that just to listen, but you get the picture. Image from http://www.ochsenmeier.com/en/listening-to-english-on-the-internet/.

Settel’s book was published in the 1960s with nostalgia in mind. Back then, the book was meant to offer a touchstone for people who wanted to channel the aural ghosts of their youth.

Alas, it’s not much of a read. The title itself suggests an obvious disconnect, a collection of visual images featuring people who were only heard, not seen:

Actress Olga Petrova appeared before the microphone in costume, as many performers in radio would later do…

“Wake up America – time to stump the experts!” “Information Please” was perhaps the most urbane quiz program ever on radio…

Popular personalities moved from one medium to another. “Blondie and Dagwood,” made famous in the syndicated comic strip by Chic Young, moved into radio, starring Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton, who also played the roles in the movies.

Rudy Vallée is on the air. One of early radio's first big stars, he was featured on "The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour." "It was probably radio's first really professional variety show," Settel notes. Vallée is seen here in 1933, near the height of his fame. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Vallée.

Settel’s book actually begins before radio, explaining how the technology came into being in the 19^th century, and how what started out transmitted as beeps of Morse Code over telegraph wires was channeled into intelligible human speech plucked from thin air thanks in large part to the genius of a rich young Italian named Guglielmo Marconi.

By 1899, the British Marconi Company was setting up shop in the United States, and by 1913 they had acquired a native rival called United Wireless. “The merger gave American Marconi seventeen land stations and four hundred ship stations in America,” Settel writes.

Just a year before that, a wireless operator on Nantucket Island named David Sarnoff became Johnny-on-the-spot with news about the sinking of the Titanic, relaying names of survivors to anxious relatives across the United States. Four years later, working for American Marconi, Sarnoff would write a memo to his bosses about how to transform radio into “a household utility:”

David Sarnoff and Guglielmo Marconi pay a visit to RCA's broadcasting hub Radio Central in 1933. The two men together made radio the dominant media for three decades. Image from https://eyesofageneration.com/.

“The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple ‘radio music box,’ and arranged for several different wave lengths…events of national importance can be simultaneously announced and received. Baseball scores can be transmitted in the air. This proposition would be especially interesting to farmers and others living in outlying districts.”

Sarnoff, the man with the plan, would in time become host with the most by owning Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and its first country-wide radio network, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC).

Settel also spotlights Dr. Frank Conrad, an engineer who launched a radio station from his garage in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. First he tried talking on it, later he played records from a music store who asked to be named on the air in return. It was how radio advertising began. “In this period radio stations were not selling time for advertising, but were broadcasting primarily to stimulate the sale of sets,” Settel writes.

Frank Conrad's home, with garage on left. In October, 1919, he began broadcasting here using the callsign letters "8XK," testing out the equipment that would give birth to commercial radio. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Conrad 

Settel’s account of how commercial radio began is brusque and dry, but stands out as the best thing in the book. Partly this is because he relates a good story, but mostly because Settel is an otherwise charmless writer filling pages with long clippings from newspapers and magazines.

The further along radio evolves, the less of interest Settel has to say about it. Basically, it boils down to him relating which shows and performers were on top in the Crossley ratings in a given year, and saying something about them. Occasionally he lights upon an anecdote, like how Orson Welles’ “War Of The Worlds” broadcast in 1938 startled listeners into thinking a real Martian invasion was underway. But nothing lasts more than a graph or two.

Orson Welles (center) meets the press on October 31, 1938, the day after his infamous "War Of The Worlds" broadcast. While Settel presents the story as a bracing demonstration of radio's grip on the American public, scholars in recent years have cast doubt on the extent of the panic. See an article about it here: https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/1277.

Settel saves most of the details for his photo captions, some of which run multiple pages and create a real layout logjam with the main text:

Joseph M. White, the “Silver Masked Tenor,” was heard over WEAF in New York from 1923 to 1927 as soloist with the Goodrich Silvertown Orchestra. His identity was carefully guarded, and he wore a sterling silver mask when he appeared in public…

Andre Kostelanetz established a musical vogue – which persists to the present – for big orchestras and lush arrangements…

“Wanna buy a duck?” With the help of a few catch-phrases like that, which swept the country, Joe Penner became one of the top comics in radio…

A meeting of some of NBC's top radio stars of the late 1930s. From left to right: Bob Burns, Tommy Riggs, dummy Charlie McCarthy and his human partner Edgar Bergen, Rudy Vallée, and Joe Penner. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Penner.

Photo after photo of some long-dead performer making a silly face becomes drearily monotonous and speaks to the passage of time, both for radio and this book. As the book goes on to chronicle subsequent decades, you sense the steam rapidly running out of the enterprise.

The book begins in a lively way, as Settel reprints an Esquire article by humor writer Brock Brower. Titled “A Lament For Old-Time Radio,” Brower speaks directly and personally to the human impact of famous radio programs as felt by young listeners in the 1930s and 1940s:

They were the pulp classics of the air waves, these shows, and nothing like them will ever be done on television because they demanded the very thing TV has scotched: imagination. The listener produced half the show right in his own head, taking his lead from a range of voices, a musical bridge, and a few sound effects.

Settel, a professor at Pace University in New York (then Pace College), has a more sedate tone which lacks engagement or passion, two things old-time radio delivered en masse. You feel its lack here.

Jean Shepherd is one of the post-television stars of radio spotlighted in Settel's book. Shepherd's often-humorous anecdotes and commentaries were broadcast on a wide variety of stations; in 1983 a series of holiday-themed Shepherd monologues were made into a famous movie, A Christmas Story. Image from https://www.nwitimes.com/entertainment/local-filmmakers-documentary-about-jean-shepherd-includes-some-big-name-interviews.

By the time he reaches the 1950s and 1960s, he is noting television’s obliterating impact on radio network programming and snootily dismissing rock music’s dominance of the medium, calling out by way of contrast radio’s reconnection to the intellectual elite and those minorities disaffected by matters of race, language, or political beliefs:

Radio became a forum; and often the “real” pulse of public opinion was startlingly different from the ideas of the “Establishment” as written in newspapers and magazines.

That’s one idea still relevant today. The rest is a failed nostalgia trip to a time and place as out of reach now as it was in 1967. If only Settel had focused on radio’s advent, the result might have been more worthwhile. But he bit off more than he could chew, and it showed.