BW - EP123—001: January 1954—New Year 's Day With Fibber McGee and Molly

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

The United States entered 1954 in an uncertain position. Years of racial discrimination were coming to the forefront. In May, Brown vs. the Board of Education would make racial segregation in schools illegal. ___________ The Korean War was over, but the communist Red Scare was reaching its height.Dwight D. Eisenhower was completing his first year as U.S. President. Elizabeth II was now Queen of England. Joseph Stalin was dead. So was Hank Williams, Maude Adams, Jim Thorpe, Herman Mankiewicz, Dooley Wilson, Robert Taft, Edwin Hubble, and Dylan Thomas. ___________ Meanwhile, radio achieved total saturation. Ninety-eight percent of homes had a radio set. There were still nineteen million U.S. houses that could only be reached by radio. However, the four national networks continued a five-year downward trend in radio ad sales. Network radio gross revenue peaked in 1948 at just under two-hundred million dollars. In 1953, it was down to one-hundred sixty million. ___________ Procter & Gamble led the way with over fourteen million dollars spent, and forty companies, including General Foods, Colgate-Palmolive, Liggett & Myers, Campbell’s Soups, S.C. Johnson, and Coca-Cola spent at least one million dollars on radio advertising. ___________ While TV hadn’t fully supplanted radio’s total reach, it had decimated it’s prime-time audience share. On CBS-TV I Love Lucy led all shows with a 58.8 rating. It was seen in over fifteen million homes each Monday evening at 9PM. Opposite on the other medium, The Lux Radio Theater was heard in just under three million. ___________ And it turned out that as McCarthyism reached its zenith, dramatic radio would spend the first six months of 1954 facing wide-spread network cancellations. These were shows that just six years earlier were at the forefront of national consciousness. ___________ Radio’s heyday was over. Tonight, we’ll go back to January of 1954 and search for more answers. ___________ Welcome to Breaking Walls, episode 123. My name is James Scully. Tonight on Breaking Walls, we open 2022 with a six-part mini-series on radio business and programming in 1954. We’ll begin with January, in a radio half-season that was for many, the end of the line. ___________ If this is your first time listening to Breaking Walls, welcome to the show! You can find this series for free on every podcasting platform, and at TheWallBreakers.com. ___________ Tonight we’ll also begin a new programming format on Breaking Walls. Going forward, I’ll be releasing each episode in parts. These parts will be available on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Once all parts of an episode are released, I’ll release the full-length episode for those who want to listen to it in the traditional format. For those listening on Youtube for the first time, please go to TheWallBreakers.com for the full lineup of past episodes in feature length.