A short post today, well, at least short for me.  As my avatar indicates, I grew up with radio.  My family was late to television-we didn't own one until 1954, as I remember.  But there were radios.  Great big Philco floor models at both grandparents' houses, table models in mine.  My first memories of drama revolve around Boston Blackie, The Shadow, Sargent Preston of the Mounties, and the like, and also the soap operas which were on when I came home for lunch from school and in the afternoon when Mrs. Mee had finished cramming knowledge into my head (along with the other teachers-of course.   Mrs. Mee was remarkable because she had one blue eye and one brownish eye-I guess I would have called it hazel if I knew the word).

Anyhow, I thought I'd just bring a few of the old radio shows to everyone's attention, and point you toward a treasure trove of free broadcasts available on the internet.  If I miss anyone's favorite, I apologize....and let me say at the outset I'm going to concentrate primarily on those which didn't make it to television, and leave those like The Life of Riley and The Great Gildersleeve for another day.

Radio was replete with soaps in which the heroes and heroines were working class heroes.  Lorenzo Jones and his Wife, Belle, would be a good case in point.  It was one of my noontime favorites.  Lorenzo dreamed big-a tinkerer in the great tradition of Thomas Edison-but without Edison's success.  Townsfolk laughed at him, both behind his back and to his face.  He kept his job at the local garage, but never saw that as the end of his rainbow.  Belle supported him 1,000%.  

Just Plain Bill was another favorite.  Bill was a barber, and something of a barber-pole philosopher.  Common Sense and a warm heart.  The barber shop was the place to go for advice and practical wisdom-rather like Barack Obama's barbershop probably was.  We lost a lot when barbers became hair stylists, I think.  My barber, a lot like Bill, is just that:  a barber!  And don't you forget it!  Call him anything else and you might get a bum's rush out the door.  And I don't shell out no $400.00 for a makeover either.  So There!

And there was Ma Perkins, the female equivalent of Just Plain Bill.  As I remember it, this soap opera really was a soap opera.  Oxydol sponsored it in Minneapolis, where I grew up and listened to it while I was in grade school.  Bill and Ma were full of sympathy for those whose luck didn't hold, whether in economic or romantic terms.  None of the people they encountered were "losers" in their eyes.

A quick mention of two others and I'm done and outa here.  At least two radio shows dealt with inter-class conflicts.  One of them, Our Gal Sunday, asked whether a young, unsophisticated girl from the golden West could be happy as the wife of England's richest lord.  The answer was yes, of course.  And in the course of defending and defining that happiness over and over (remember, these were serials), Sunday countered and punctured the pretensions of snobs, foreign and domestic.  Titles didn't provide nobility, and pedigrees didn't either.  Character was the issue-not education and not breeding.

The other, Stella Dallas, took place in Boston-if not exactly Hub of the Universe, hub of Boston Brahman snobbery-some of you may have read Rise of Silas Lapham...if you haven't, get to it.  Anyhow, Stella is a mother-in-law: but the mother-in-law to die for.  Entirely supportive of her daughter, who has married "above her class," and greatly respected by her son-in-law, who is such a disappointment for marrying below his, Stella may be "just" a seamstress, but she's not one to belittle herself for working with her hands.  Mother-in-laws come in pairs, and Mrs. Grosvenor was Stella Dallas's nemesis.  Guess who won?  Stella, of course, over, and over, and over again, for seventeen years.

What does all this tell me?  For one thing, that the working class in the depression and post-war years respected its class status, and was a significant enough portion of the listening audience that the sponsors had to respect it as well.  These persons could be laughed with, but not laughed at.  One source of this strength was the union movement, of course.

What I'm coming to believe is that one of the actions of the right has been to try to shatter the working classes respectability and solidarity.  Part of this has been to emphasize the difference between "blue collar" and "white collar" jobs so that persons consider this measure, rather than power in and protection from the excesses of the economic system.   For example...one hears often that teachers demean themselves by unionizing-after all, they're college educated and unions are beneath their dignity.  When my college faculty unionized, we heard the same thing.  Unions were for the buildings and grounds folks, not for us.  We unionized anyway, thank goodness.  The Yeshiva Decision (very wrong, mho, and in need of reversal) demonstrates how important it is to the managerial class to keep power in their own hands.

That's enough for now.  Oh Yes, I nearly forgot.  I promised you a treasure trove.     How about 12,000 free radio recordings at the Old Time Radio Network?  And as a bonus treasure, how about JJ's Newspaper Radio Logs:   "This site has been created and is presented for OTR (Old Time Radio) researchers. It contains over 45,000 newspaper radio logs compiled from the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Daily Tribune, and Las Angeles Times, spanning the years from 1930 through 1960."

And you can listen while you're reading TPM.  Happy multi-tasking.