Admittedly, as per my previous disclosure, I was too much a child of the television generation. I was a mere 3 weeks old when my parents acquired their first television set; accordingly, I have never known life without it. With the preceding stated, I was always curious about life prior to television becoming commonly available to American households, but not too much prior; that is, when radio was the primary means of entertainment in the home.

As a young child, I would hear my grandparents speak of radio programs to which they listened “back in the day,” and that made me long for what I perceived to be a lost opportunity. A television advertisement from my early teens featured a record which contained excerpts of the most popular radio programs from its heyday. I never did purchase the record, but I so wanted to hear the entire broadcasts from the excerpts of such programs as Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, Suspense, Ma Perkins. The popularity of radio programs was beginning to fade rapidly when I was born, as television was establishing a strong foothold. A few months before I was born, the decision was made to pull the plug on the highest rated radio daytime drama, “The Guiding Light,” which would from that point forward, be presented only on television. For all of my vivid memories of television from my very early years, I have very few about radio programs. A very vague memory is hearing a bit of dialogue and organ music from either Ma Perkins or The Right To Happiness, which were two of the serials which endured until the end, the day after Thanksgiving of 1960, when I was just over 4 years old.