"Let's Pretend"

Harry Heuser's post about that much loved radio kid show really got my memory cells and hyperactive radio glands glands percolating. Harry was surprised that I wrote to the show asking for a piece of transitional music in one of the dramatized stories rather than something a child would be more interered in. That can send me off in a couple different directions. First off, I wasn't a small child, but probably a young teenager. Today's vintage radio program collectors categorize the shows in their databases. But back in radio's so-called golden age, radio listening was a family event. Mom and pop and the kids all heard the kid shows, soap operas, dramatic and musical shows.Crime shows, too, and I didn't become a serial killer. There might be the big console radio in the living room and maybe a small set in the kitchen. If you wanted big city entertainment in your home, you got it from radio. That's all there was. The family listened to it together. "Gathering around the family radio" is not a Norman Rockwell myth. It was really like that, incomprehensible as it might be to today's generation. It's probably impossible for anyone under age 70 or so to imagine the role that radio played in American family life in those days. My parents heard "Let's Pretend" with me and I listened to "Amos 'n Andy" along with them.
Ok. I popped off about that part of it. More personally speaking, I was probably born to be in radio, fascinated by the medium at an early age. When I won a grade school spellintg bee and got to tour WWJ and The Detroit News plant as a prize, the only question I asked at WWJ radio was "what's the difference between a record and a transcription?" I had to know how radio worked and why those golden voiced announcers told me "the following program is recorded and transcribed." Incidentally, as late as the 50's, when I got into the radio business, we still had to let the audience know that those musicians and actors were not really in the studio but they had been recorded. I even had to enter on the station log the time when I made that announcement. As a deejay, I would say "these records are just that" to make it legal. I doubt that anybody out there in radioland thought that Doris Day and the Les Brown Band were realy there with me, but the FCC was slow to change outdated rules. Now they have gone the other way. But that's a subject for another discourse, rant or whatever it turns out to be. So thanks, Harry. You ask good questions.