© Copyright 2004 Jeanne Shannon
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When I look back at my childhood in the early 1940s "in the South of the Mountain," one of my most vivid and detailed memories is of listening to the radio. My earliest such recollection —-at about age three—-is of hearing a man on the radio singing "Hand me down my bottle of corn, I'm gonna get drunk, as sure as you're born." I knew those lyrics were not "nice." (I must have known a lot at age three!) I remember sitting in my little rocking chair in the kitchen early one frosty fall morning singing those words "at the top of my voice" while my grandmother (Palmyra Boyd) and mother (Della Boyd) were making biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Though I was singing at full volume, I was trying to slur the words so that they couldn't be understood. I must have succeeded, for I didn't get scolded for singing a "nasty" song.

Though my memory of it is vague, I think the radio we had then was a tabletop model in the "gothic church window" style that was popular in the 1930s—battery-operated, of course, since there was no electricity in much of rural Dickenson County in those days. Later Daddy (Tolly Boyd) sold that radio and bought another one, a big boxy tabletop unit that used two large batteries and a smaller one, and that sat on a table in the front room, by the window that looked west toward Wise County. 

When World War II began, everybody became interested in hearing the "war news." If the batteries on our radio had run down, Daddy would go next door to Andrew and Ernie Stanley's home or to Enoch and Meda Moore's (who lived next door in the other direction, just across the Wise County line). They would listen to Edward R. Murrow, Gabriel Heatter, Lowell Thomas, Cedric Foster, H. V. Kaltenborn, and other commentators who brought news from London and Berlin, and Daddy would come home and tell us what he had heard about the strange, wicked man called Adolf Hitler. 

In those days my family used "Hatley's Silver Leaf Lard" (everybody cooked with lard back then, before we knew about the dangers of fat and cholesterol). Because "Hatley" sounded a lot like "Hitler" to me, I wondered whether it was a bad thing to have that brand of lard in the kitchen.

At that time we also had a large cabinet-model record player, which some called a "Victrola," others called a "phonograph," and some still called a "talking machine." It stood against the north wall of the "Far Room," the "Pretty Room" that I described in my article about having the rooms wallpapered. The turntable was at the top, so high up that I couldn't reach it. After every record, the machine had to be "wound up" with a hand crank and a new needle inserted. Daddy loved to play the recordings of The Carter Family-songs he had no doubt first heard on the radio. (Probably he bought the phonograph, and maybe the radio, from Russell Fleming, who lived not far away.) In moments of reverie, I can still hear Mother Maybelle's "Wildwood Flower" and her plaintive song about the "lonesome valley" of death ringing through the air of long-ago summer afternoons.

Soon I discovered that there was more on the radio than war news. There was the Grand Ole Opry from WSM in Nashville every Saturday night. Judge George D. Hay, "the solemn old judge," serving as announcer. Roy Acuff mourning the loss of his "Precious Jewel," Bill Monroe singing about a girl whose footprints he traced in the snow, and Ernest Tubb walking the floor because some woman had brought him grief. And Minnie Pearl greeting the audience with an enthusiastic "How-deee! I'm just so proud to be here!" before launching into her comedy routine about the news from Grinder Switch. 

My parents said they thought I would stay up all night to listen to the Grand Ole Opry if I were allowed to. I (and the rest of my family too, I think) liked Roy Acuff best of all. I memorized the words to his "Precious Jewel" and "Wabash Cannon Ball," and would sing all the verses of "Precious Jewel" to anybody who had the patience to listen. When a Grand Ole Opry songbook was advertised, of course my parents ordered it, mostly because of Roy's songs. But the songbook held other treasures, especially the photographs. There were pictures of Uncle Dave Macon and his son Dorris, Bashful Brother Oswald and Rachel (she was holding a banjo), Jamup and Honey, Peewee King and the Golden West Cowboys, Stringbean, Grandpa Jones, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, the Possum Hunters, and of course Minnie Pearl wearing her big hat with the store tag hanging from the brim.

A while later I found out about the daytime dramas, the "soap operas." (I was able to listen to the radio in the daytime because I didn't attend school regularly; my parents, mostly Daddy, taught me at home.) I learned about these dramas, or "stories" as they were called, when Momma was teaching at Mullins School near Pound and boarding during the week at the home of Freeling Mullins. She came home one weekend and told us about how Freeling and his wife loved to listen to the adventures of Lorenzo Jones and his wife, Belle. Lorenzo was known for his eccentric inventions that nobody would buy, and Belle for her seemingly endless patience. 

Freeling also followed the trials and tribulations of Joan Davis, the heroine of When a Girl Marries. When Momma first heard about that program, Joan had been kidnapped, taken away from her happy home in the town of Beechwood, and held prisoner in a mountain cabin. Day after day Freeling would listen for news of her rescue, which came after two or three weeks. (Yes, the plots of soap operas moved just as slowly then as they do now.) I tuned in to WLW Cincinnati, an NBC "clear channel station," one afternoon (or "evening," as we called it) at 5:00 to learn about Joan's fate just after she had been reunited with her husband, Harry, and their young son, Sammy.

Then I began to turn the radio on earlier and earlier in the day. Sometimes I tuned in to Ma Perkins at 3 o'clock, but usually I began listening at 3:30, when Pepper Young's Family was aired. At 3:45 was The Right to Happiness, in which Dwight and Carolyn Kramer never seemed to find the happiness they supposedly had a right to. At 4 o'clock came the sufferings of Mary Noble, Backstage Wife, about a little Iowa girl married to Larry Noble, "matinee idol of a million other women." Then came Stella Dallas, a poor seamstress whose daughter Laurel ("Lollie") had married into the high society of Boston's Beacon Hill. Next, the announcer invited listeners to "smile awhile" with "loveable, impractical Lorenzo Jones." Young Widder Brown, the story of widow Ellen Brown and her romance with Anthony Loring, finished out the hour. At 5 o'clock I returned to hearing the voice of Mary Jane Higby as Joan Davis, now safely back in Beechwood but concerned that Betty McDonald, her husband Harry's secretary, was trying to steal Harry from her.

After Joan and Harry left the airwaves, Portia Faces Life, Front Page Farrell, and Life Can Be Beautiful continued the series of dramas. I listened to them off and on, but they never had the appeal of the other stories—maybe because by that time of day I was just tired of listening.

Although my grandmother was usually working around the house while I was listening to the radio, she never showed much interest in following the unfolding dramas. Mother boarded away during the weeks of the school year except when she was teaching at Osborne's Gap School, and Daddy had no interest in the "stories." So I was often sitting alone in the front room by the radio, hearing unfamiliar and exciting worlds take shape across the airwaves. 

One of the minor characters on Life Can Be Beautiful was named Margaret Reynolds. I decided to take this name as my own, because somehow "Margaret" expressed the person I wanted to be far better than my own name did. In some of the books I had during that time, particularly a big red dictionary my parents bought me, the owner's name on the flyleaf is listed as "Margaret Reynolds." And in recent years, psychics who knew nothing of my childhood have told me they see the name Margaret around me. On the program, Margaret had a sister, Andrea. Since I was an only child and wanted a sister, I invented one and named her Andrea. 

If there were so many stories on in the late afternoon, what about earlier in the day, I wondered. I soon found Hearts in Harmony, David Harum, The Goldbergs, The Road of Life, The Romance of Helen Trent, Young Doctor Malone, Vic and Sade, The Guiding Light (isn't it still around as a daytime drama on television?), and Our Gal Sunday, among others. Sunday was a girl from a little mining town in Colorado who married an English Lord, Lord Henry Brinthrope, and moved with him to his estate called Black Swan Hall in Virginia. Not our part of Virginia, certainly.

In 1944 (a reference book tells me) a new morning soap opera came on the air. It was called Rosemary and was written by Elaine Carrington, who also wrote the scripts for Pepper Young's Family and When a Girl Marries. One scene I remember vividly was one in which two women were setting the table for dinner, which was the evening meal rather than the mid-day meal; city people always seemed to call supper "dinner," I had discovered. One of the women said to the other, "Put down two teaspoons, one for coffee and one for dessert." I had never heard of such a thing, one spoon being considered adequate for any meal our family ever served. That was a lesson in how "city folks" lived and thought.

Yes, listening to these programs contributed greatly to my education. I learned new words-for example, I heard "memo" for the first time in a conversation between Harry Davis and his secretary. I learned about what life in a city might entail—things like what an apartment was, what a doorbell was and how it sounded, and what the duties of a maid might be—one of which was, of course, answering the door when the doorbell rang. I learned about names-that women could be named "Crystal" and "Madge" and "Sandra," and that men could be named "Forest" and "Rudy," names I hadn't heard in Dickenson County. I found some of these names so interesting that I named one of the hens on the farm "Sandra Barkley," after a character on one of the soap operas. (This hen had mostly gold feathers with some black plumage around her neck. From earliest memory I have had "colored hearing"—that is, all words and sounds have a color to me-and since "Sandra" is gold and "Barkley" black, that seemed a perfect name for the chicken.)

The names of towns and streets in these programs fascinated me: Joan Davis's towns of Beechwood and Stanwood, the Rushville Center of Ma Perkins, Blondie and Dagwood's Shady Lane Avenue. I named the path from the lower barn up to the cemetery "Fox Meadow Lane" because Joan and Harry Davis lived on a street by that name. The Youngs of Pepper Young's Family lives in a town called Elmwood, and soon I gave that name to our farm, though it had no elm trees as far as I know. Camp Jacob, the old Lipps homeplace at South of the Mountain, is still "Elmwood" to me. 

Many of these dramas were sponsored by soap companies, which is why they came to be called "soap operas," I suppose. Camay, "the soap of beautiful woman," sponsored Pepper Young's Family, and Ivory ("Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent pure—it floats") was a sponsor of Life Can Be Beautiful. Bab-O Scouring Powder brought David Harum to the air. Oxydol, Duz, and Rinso were popular soap powders in those days, and they were also among the program sponsors. But there were many other advertisers as well. Anacin, BC Headache Powder, Dr. Lyons Tooth Powder, Certo, Baker's Cocoa, and Calumet Baking Powder were among the products that I heard praised by the announcers.

There were also music programs in the daytime. Early in the morning, sometimes before I got out of bed, my parents would often have the radio tuned to the Renfro Valley Barn Dance from WHAS in Louisville. In the early afternoon I listened to the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round from WNOX in Knoxville, where in addition to country music I heard Dixieland Jazz (which I didn't like) for the first time. 

And of course there were the radio preachers. Some of them used the song called "Turn Your Radio On" as part of their broadcasts. My parents listened to E. Howard Cadle preaching in the mornings on a program called The Cadle Tabernacle. Mrs. Cadle provided organ music and sang hymns. Then Preacher Cadle died suddenly and was replaced by a man whose name sounded like "Lake-un," but I have no idea how to spell it. 

Daddy soon began to think that I was spending far too much time listening to the radio. He thought I wasn't getting enough fresh air and exercise, for when he was working around the farm he didn't often see me playing along the banks of White Oak Creek or pushing my doll Nancy in her carriage down the path to the milk gap and the lower barn. He decided to put a stop to my sedentary ways by making the radio malfunction. The radio had one knob for tuning, another for volume, and a third that said "short wave," which gave more static than anything else. He turned this one to a spot that gave only static, and for a while I thought the radio was out of order. Then I played with the knobs and got the regular stations back. When I went running out to find Daddy and tell him I had "fixed" the radio, I wondered why he didn't look pleased. He also tried unplugging one of the batteries, but I found out how to fix that too. (Incidentally, many years later I assured him that the education I had received through listening to the radio had been priceless, and well worth giving up a few hours of sunshine.)

After he found that unplugging the battery didn't work, Daddy's only way of putting a stop to my "radioing" was to delay replacing the batteries once they had run down. But this usually didn't last more than a few weeks, for he wanted to listen to Lowell Thomas and the others in the evenings while the family sat around the fire eating our supper of cornbread crumbled into milk. And all of us liked to listen to the adventures of Lum and Abner in their Jot 'Em Down Store, of Baby Snooks (played by Fanny Brice), and of Amos and Andy, the Kingfish, and Sapphire. (That was a long time before Amos 'n' Andy fell into disfavor because it was considered racist.)

Among the other programs we listened to in the evenings were the Jack Benny Show, the Chesterfield Supper Club, Henry Aldrich, Mr. and Mrs. North (Pam and Jerry North, amateur detectives), and Blondie.

In the early weeks of 1946 I started listening to an evening program that featured popular music, or "orchestra music" as some called it. I decided that kind of music wasn't so bad after all, though up to that time I had liked only "hillbilly" music. Listening to this program, I learned to like a song about a trolley with a bell that went "clang, clang, clang," and another one that promised, "Gonna dance with a dolly with a hole in her stocking, gonna dance by the light of the moon."

In mid-March of that year we moved from Dickenson County to the Hurricane community in Wise County. There was a new station on the air that spring, WNVA in Norton. Now I would be going to school full time and could no longer listen to the daytime dramas. I found new and different programs to listen to after school; but that's another story, and "The Hurricane" was for me a different world.

Author's Note: Although I consulted a couple of reference books to fill in a few details, the information in this article is largely from my personal recollections. And I do recall the names of the soap opera characters; they were almost as "alive" to me as real people.

For anyone interested in reading more about these and other programs from the golden years of radio broadcasting, I recommend a book called "On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio", by John Dunning. It is available on amazon.com or can be ordered through bookstores.

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