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The homes’ radio hummed in the background all day long. It could be heard in the barbershops and mechanic’s garage, blaring out from the porch where a teenager lived. It was everywhere. And in the daytime it was usually turned to the “soaps” because women were yet homemakers not breadwinners. Well, perhaps a part-time job might lure her away from the soap operas. The fifteen minute programs in daytime, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, were called “washboard weepers,” “sudsers” but mostly “soap operas” because many of the sponsors of the programs were laundry or cosmetic soaps, cleansers, cleaners of some sort. Household products filled in the blanks ... Gelatins, baking needs, drugs like Anacin or Alka Seltzer and so forth. Send in a dime or box top or both from any of those to get a little recipe booklet. Many were the critics of daytime radio soaps, of course, mostly men at the brainy level who may have discounted the emotional appeal or escape to adventure and excitement for the housebound homemaker. To them their critique was “tripe,” or a “deluge of dirt.” But for the most part the millions of housewives or single women who devotedly listened tuned that out from the very beginning. There is some uncertainty about when the first daytime serial program occurred but most accurate sources point to “The Smith Family” broadcast in 1925 from Chicago. “Amos and Andy” and the “Goldberg’s” were shuffled in there at about the same time. You’ll realize how popular The Smith Family could have been when you learn that Marian and Jim Jordan were its leads, later Fibber McGee and Molly, always in the top ten favorites when broadcast from 79 Wistful Vista. Not much is known about those first years but by 1930 the daytime serial was well on its way. Listed below are just a few daytime “soaps” that radio fans might recognize their names because, after all, some radio stations carry Old Time Radio. WSDR, Sterling - weekday afternoons, 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. and WBBM, Chicago - every weeknight, 12:00 to 1:00 at night. “Life Can Be Beautiful” sponsored by Proctor and Gamble products, in this case, Spic and Span cleanser. Amongst the “in-crowd” who listened without fail, it was known as El C BB or Elsie Bebe! It followed the life of a ghetto chick whose name was changed from Carol to Chichi who had stumbled into a used book store to be taken in by its proprietor, David Solomon, a kindly old gent who gave her a pallet to sleep on in the back room. She was found there fifteen years later, the victim of many an adventure for some reason as yet unexplored. And to add to the mystery she was hiding from racketeer, Gyp Mendoza. Naturally, Chichi fell in love with a crippled lawyer whose disability was more than offset by his keen and clever mind. If it wasn’t one problem after another we don’t know what was. “Our Gal Sunday” sponsored by P & G and Kolynos toothpaste. “Can an orphan from a little mining town in Colorado (Silver Creek) find happiness as wife of the wealthy and titled Englishman, Lord Henry Brinthrope, was the daily sign-on, Sunday also led an adventurous life ... Kidnapped by cattle rustlers, held for ransom, etc., etc., etc. OGS was one of the five major soap operas written by Frank and Anne Hummert, all of them popular. They were most prolific and “Sunday” is described as the “most enduring and least credible” of the Hummert’s top five, this according to author John Dunning whose history of daytime radio is unsurpassed. Sunday’s marriage to Lord Henry was kept in limbo for seven years. How’s that for story line? “Ma Perkins” sponsored by Oxydol laundry soap. Ma was called “America’s mother of the air.” She counseled America from 1933 to 1960, twenty-seven years so she couldn’t have been too bad at her philosophical renderings. She managed a lumberyard in Rushville Center (population 4,000) with the help of Shuffle Shorber and a host of characters. Life in Rushville Center was filled with tears, troubles, maniacs and melodrama to the saturation point but Ma was never too busy to stop what she was doing to help someone. The Golden Rule guided her. She was called the “Female— Just Plain Bill,” another soap opera. And while we talk about guiding there was the “Guiding Light” which may have had the longest life of all the soaps. It began on radio in 1937, sponsored by White Naptha soap. It moved to television in 1952. It wrapped there in 2009, seventy-two years as storyteller, quite an accomplishment. Its initial creator was a twenty-seven year old actress for WGN, Chicago, Irma Phillips. Unlike the Hummerts, Phillips wrote the programs by herself, dictating to a secretary—a million words a year to be lined into script. The Hummert’s had a large staff which sorted out the ideas and characters because with five shows they could get them mixed. The staff could be said to have been co-writers! The main characters one year might not have been in the script the next year ... They faded over time but the show did have, perhaps, some of the most famous actors to go on to movies and other headlines in television such as James Earl Jones, Kevin Bacon, Melinda Kanakaredes and more. “Just Plain Bill” (Kolynos toothpaste). “Bill” had a barbershop in the small town of Hartville. Frank and Anne Hummert preferred life in a small town. It could more easily manipulated and organized. Bill, the hometown philosopher, salt of the earth-type, always had time for the troubled and insecure—and the normal and ordinary, too, even though he’d become involved in some dire situations. Once “Old Man Willis” was stalking Bill with a shotgun as the town watched. Bill’s daughter Nancy lay near death in her bed at home, the home she shared with, of course, attractive and highbrow husband, Kevin Donovan. Most of the soaps girls were usually on a lower social level than their rich and matinee idol-like hubbies. Donovan was described as being “sometimes jealous, often moody.” Entering politics, he developed some diabolical schemes to add to the simplicity of Bill’s just plain life. The rural theme was introduced by folk music (Polly Wolly Doodle, of all things) played by a harmonica and guitar instead of the usual deep-throated, versatile organ of other programs. “Bill” ended his clippings and counseling in 1955, just as the soaps were dwindling in number. Two brands of soap named two night time programs although they weren’t “soaps.” The Rinso Show that starred entertainer Al Jolson and Lux Radio Theater, a long-time favorite because it dramatized a popular movie and the radio players were some famous movie star, sometimes as many as four of them. The most important director in Hollywood at the time was Cecil B. DeMille who hosted the show. His distinctive voice was a signature identity Lux, a hand soap, like many another soap product paid the bills in the thirty-five years and little more of the heyday of radio serials broadcasts. Networks could not complain as some of the critics had. Underline the bottom of the ledger column in black. For instance, in 1935 sponsors paid out nearly $12,000,000 for advertising. Just four years later in 1939 the amount had climbed to over $27,000,000 for their name on the airwaves. The soap makers, the flour millers, the drug laboratories and all the other household products who paid the bills knew what they were doing. They were appealing to the housewives, the secretaries, the line worker, the feminine seeking an imaginative fling through the radio. Her humdrum life for a few minutes was a bit of excitement. Those who’ve researched and studied the soap opera genre found it a valuable social force and a positive one. Mary Noble, “Backstage Wife,” had to cope diplomatically with the glamorous admirers who clamored after her actor husband, Larry. There’d be villainy, intrigue, boredom and trouble of every form; that if Young Widder Brown could overcome them while raising two fatherless children so could the average housewife. Radio was an important tool in the forming of America. And unlike today’s movies and television the mature woman could be the heroine, not some buxom chick under thirty who are cast in today’s shows. The mature women were just as important for furthering the plot as the babes. Look at Ma Perkins, Tugboat Annie (with humor, too), Molly McGee and Helen Trent, as in the “Romance of Helen Trent.” Her romances existed for over twenty-seven years and she had twenty-eight of them in that time, she being a “woman of uncertain age.” Maybe even over fifty. Oh, my! Her husbands-to-be ran into a plethora of problems ... Mania, murder, heart attack doing and being jilted, disappearing without trace, etc. The Hummert’s thought of any thing to have Helen Trent have a new vigorous romance. She was called the “queen of the soaps” because she was Goodness personified ... She didn’t smoke, drink or utter even the mildest of oath. She was example to millions of listeners. Like the western movie plot, Helen’s exemplary life was good, evil the other person, black or white and the listener knew which was which. Review claimed that Helen never laughed. You can see why.
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