1930s predictions of radio's future

Harry Heuser quotes a 1936 radio magazine wondering about who will be the big radio stars in 1950. Who could have predicted that network radio would be pretty much gone, with Ma Perkins, Don McNeil's Breakfast Club and one or two other remnants of that kind of radio hanging on for dear life while the big radio personalities of the '50s would be disk jockeys. That's the year I began my less-than-spectacular career in the radio biz. But even I was a local hotshot star of sorts in Flint, Michigan. It was a good time to be a deejay. We had fans and fan mail. And we had women! I married one of my fans. Strictly formatted, top 40 radio had not yet taken away our freedom to be creative. We learned to adlib. We became good air salesmen. One of the stations where I worked had no written commercials. There were little cards with a few lines about the advertiser and what he was selling and we had to adlib an effective commercial from those notes. We played our own favorite records and talked about them as much as we wanted to. The great "announcers" who came before us orated to a faceless entity, the ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience. They even used their stentorian tones to identify themselves in impersonal terms. "Your announcer has been Clanton W. Clanton." But I'll give them one thing. They knew that "W" has three syllables. We deejays learned to communicate, one-on-one, to be a friend in homes and cars.My personal broadcast idol, who came from that stiff, formal kind of radio and broke out of it and poked fun at it to become the industry's greatest communicator and air salesman was Arthur Godfrey. He could sell Chesterfield Cigarettes and Lipton Tea like no one before or since. It was a wonderfully creative time in radio. I am grateful to have been a part of it.