Who Will Cover the Vital Midriff?

Welcome to Continuous Wave, your quirky newsletter about the history of audio and all electronic media.

So it’s hot in the Northern Hemisphere, and a holiday weekend in the USA. Today, a post that’s mainly for scrolling, in a non-doomy way.

When radio drew itself

Careful readers — which of course means all you readers — may have noticed I often link back to a site called World Radio History. I’d love to do a whole post on that project, but suffice to say for now that the broadcasting world has its own Internet Archive, and it’s amazing. (Though I’m guessing ours is not housed in a former Christian Science temple filled with ceramic statues of archivists).

Anyway, among its many holdings, World Radio History has hundreds of scanned back-issues of US radio’s first real trade journal, Broadcasting, which started in 1931. As I was looking through articles there, I started to notice the many ads from regional stations and station groups. They were trying to attract sponsors and ad buyers to their operations. But since many of these stations were also part of national networks — especially as the years went on — they ran programming slates similar to everywhere else. So they had to distinguish themselves in other ways, namely by what made their audiences or markets special. You will see that the visual ideas of radio people are sometimes…odd.

Alas The Telecommunications Act of 1996 mostly put an end to what was left of the USA’s local-ownership model by allowing conglomerates to scoop up station groups around the country. I actually wrote about the law around that time, and that piece from the dawn of Internet Time is still online! (Knock on WOOD, now owned by iHeart Radio.)

Where are we from?

Podcast producers and listeners can learn something from these corny local ads. First, see if you don’t feel a little burst of excitement if one of them mentions your hometown or state. And then think about what my favorite media studies professor Neil Verma has to say about us and radio:

So many things seem hard to fix right now, but saying where you are? That seems doable! (Especially if you live in the Vital Midriff).

I’ll leave you to scroll through these locally-proud and locally-weird Broadcasting ads at your leisure. Stay for a special illustration from a listener at the end.

…and finally

Thanks so much to David Gleason, the keeper of World Radio History, and his insane scanner rigs! If you see other great local station ads, please share them with the People.

UPDATE: David points us to WRH’s Radio Station Albums page, which has hundreds of promotional photo albums and booklets by local stations in the 1930s-50s, grouped by region. I am amazed! 😱